Jumping Fences
by aejaycee
Summary: Sirius Black has been running his entire life: from his family, from traditions, even his own choices. Settling slowly into his best friend's home after running away for the last time, he is offered a glimpse at how his life could have turned out if he'd chosen differently. And that glimpse comes in the form of a mysterious, dark-haired girl living just over the neighboring fence.
1. L'appel du vide

L'appel du vide: (_French) _"The call of the void" ; it is significantly used to describe the instinctive urge to jump from high places.

* * *

_"…you can hate a place with all your heart and soul and still be homesick for it." -Joseph Mitchell_

* * *

**Taking** Sirius Black in was not unlike trying to care for a feral cat.

He was jumpy, skittish, and hated to be touched; hugs, so often exchanged in the Potter home, caused him to stiffen uncomfortably, as if he was about to be struck. He would never ask for food -perhaps habit had taught him better- but when it was placed in front of him, he devoured it like it was his last meal. He'd taken to wandering the house late at night, roaming the hallways, finding his borders.

And yet, he was Sirius. He had been through and ordeal and he didn't laugh quite as loudly, but he was Sirius and the Potters were glad to have him.

"I feel bad freeloading on your vacation," Sirius said gruffly one morning, watching the sunrise beginning to peek over the distant hills.

He was standing in the kitchen of the Potter's summer home: a sprawling manor on the Devon coast in an ancient pure-blood-only community surrounded by iron gates, enforced walls, and the open sea to the south. It had once served as a safe haven in the days when magic was grounds for persecution, but now served as both a status symbol and an escape from real life for those who'd had the homes passed down to them through generations.

Sirius's own family had a house only streets away but it served them in the last few years for appearances only, occasionally lodging on a weekend visit, but nothing more. The Blacks had more than summer holidays on their minds, in the past few years especially.

"Don't think of it as freeloading, dear," Mrs. Potter chided in that way she had- warm and loving yet teasing and sarcastic all in one. "Think of it as us not trusting you alone in the main house. Though I dare say separating you and James might save me some grey hairs."

"You don't look a day over twenty five, mum," James sighed obediently, but with a tone of affection he reserved for only her. He'd just stumbled in through a side door that led to an entrance chamber containing only an old brick fireplace and multiple pots of floo powder- the only true way in and out of the summer village.

James was dusted with soot and struggling under the weight of the trunk he carried, but looked otherwise cheerful. It was no secret that he'd known it was only a matter of time before Sirius left home. Though the runaway's skittish and cold behavior had originally put a damper on the excitement of adding a new unofficial brother to the family, James's elation at knowing Sirius was with them and safe had trumped all of the growing pains.

"If it's too much trouble, I could go ba-" Sirius began to protest, furrowing his brow in concern.

"I think a bit of a vacation would do you good," said Mrs. Potter matter-of-factly, cutting across Sirius. "It's high time someone let you know: you're not an inconvenience."

And there they hung in the air, the magic words he'd been waiting to hear without realizing it. It was like letting out a breath of fresh air he'd been holding in for years. He was not an inconvenience. He was a person. A person who'd finally found a place, outside of school, where he felt welcome. Not entirely comfortable yet, but welcome all the same.

"James will give you a tour of the house while I make dinner," Mrs. Potter sighed, giving the luggage-packed kitchen a sweeping look. "Hopefully that elf of ours is skulking around here somewhere to move these trunks out of the way."

"Oh Padfoot here doesn't need the grand tour," James groaned, shooting a sidelong look at Sirius. "He'll be alone all day, won't he? Bit of exploring will help pass the time. Give it a couple days, Sirius'll know the place better than we do."

"What do you mean he'll be alone- oh, Merlin, I'd forgotten about your summer job, James." Mrs. Potter pressed her mouth into a thin line, shooting an undisguised look of concern in Sirius's direction. In all of the bustle of Sirius joining the family full-time and

"Hey I'd be happy to take the summer off," James laughed with a wink. Mrs. Potter's eyes remained stern but the corners of her mouth turned up in an unmistakable suppressed smile.

"Nice try," she scoffed at her son, shaking her head and turning towards the kitchen. "Your father is really looking forward to you shadowing him at the Ministry. And it's like I've always said, you need to learn the value of gold before-"

"Before you drop the whole lot of it in my lap. Merlin, mum, I know." James sunk into the nearest chair with an exasperated groan, ruffling his hair so that it obscured the lenses of his round glasses.

"If we're being honest here," Sirius cut in, a shadow of his forgotten trademarked smirk crossing his lips, the first joking he'd felt up to in the two weeks he'd been living with the Potters full time. "James will be home by dinner time, and I sleep roughly until then anyway."

"Valid point," James said, breaking into a grin and pumping a victorious hand into the air. "See? He'll be perfectly fine. There's nothing around town to show him either. There's the clubhouse-"

"-where I won't go," Sirius jumped in, remembering both his own apprehensions and the Potters warnings about steering clear of places he might run into any extended members of his family.

They said it was out of good manners -they didn't want to seem as if they were "parading" him around- but he knew it went so much deeper than that. He was only sixteen still. Sirius's parents knew very well where he was, he was sure of it. But if he kept a low profile for long enough and didn't draw attention to his departure, they weren't likely to press legal matters. Anything to save face. He'd counted on that when he left.

"-and the beach-" James pressed on, with an eye roll that suggested obvious boredom.

"-where I also won't go-"

"-and the parties, which _I'll_ go to with him. So really the only thing I need to do is show him to his room." James finished with a grand flourish of his hand, looking even more pleased with himself than usual.

"Always the least possible amount of work for you two isn't it?" Mrs. Potter sighed, shaking her head and beginning to rummage through a cabinet in the kitchen. She always insisted on cooking meals by hand. When Sirius had first starting coming to dinner at their home, he'd been perplexed as he watched her adding spices by hand and lugging heavy pots to the table all on her own. But once the food had touched his lips, he understood why she took pride in laboring over it.

Maybe that was what made the Potters so very different. They were pure-bloods like all the rest, but that wasn't what defined them. Even before the first inklings of war had appeared, there'd been a difference.

There were the pure-blood families who were pure-blood for a living, like the Blacks. They lived in the manors, did the waltzes, arranged the marriages, and did what they were told because that was how things had always been done. Good, evil, or couldn't be bothered, supporters of You-Know-Who or not- it had nothing to do with beliefs and everything to do with tradition.

And then there were the Potters, the Longbottoms, and others like them. They had the blood, and the money, and the homes, but each of them had different selling point. The Potters, for instance, were known for their hard work and warm attitudes. Both James and Sirius had been spoiled as children- Sirius with gold he had no use for or concept of, James with affection and praise. Now a runaway with nothing but a motorbike that barely worked, Sirius still would have traded their experiences if it meant having some of that gold around now.

They still participated in the culture of it all, but the traditions had more or less died out. James, Sirius was sure, had never been forced to learn a waltz a day in his life. James would be able to choose his own career path, not one that was chosen for him before birth. James, unlike Sirius, would get to choose who he wanted to marry, who he wanted to be, how he wanted to be treated.

But then again, Sirius realized with a quick start, that maybe now he could do all those things too.

* * *

**The** room was small, beige, and by all accounts completely forgettable. It was everything Sirius pretended to despise: the ordinary, the unassuming, the common-everyday-routine. And yet, as he hoisted his one bag of clothing onto the neatly-made bed in the corner, he realized with a pang that it was perfect. Unassuming though it may have been, he was finally able to fall asleep in a place he wouldn't need to plaster floor-to-ceiling with posters and muggle regalia just to prove a point.

He could finally fall asleep somewhere that was a real bedroom, not a battleground. Somewhere where he wouldn't wake up in a cold sweat every few weeks with his father standing over him menacingly, trying to coerce him into madness when he was still disoriented, or his brother timidly knocking as he was still entering, white hands and a fat lip.

It was four neutral walls, one square window over the headboard, and a closet just big enough to hold what he'd grabbed when leaving the house and the few things that he'd accepted from James as an alternative to the embarrassment of having the Potter parents take him shopping. It was wonderful.

He unpacked in a lightheaded daze; at school, he was never really unpacked. His trunk spilled over with the clothes he decided to grab for in the morning, bobbing and fishing until his hand hit an appealing material, tossing the rejected or worn items onto the floor between his bed and Moony's. But here he folded each of his few shirts carefully into the drawer of his bedside table, hung his robes and leather jacket gingerly in the closet onto wire hangers that were cold underneath his fingers. It wasn't like him, but he did it here. It didn't matter what any of the Potters told him over the dinner table or as they found a way to slip him another household convenience: he still felt like he was earning his keep.

With a resigned groan once all his clothes were away, Sirius sank into the soft mattress of the bed that was now his for the summer. He tossed back and forth uncomfortably for a long moment- it was perfectly adequate, as far as beds went, but he was still learning the house, the surroundings, the smells. He was fooling himself if he thought he could be comfortable right away. It would be a miracle if he ever slept soundly again.

His eyes drifted shut little by little, getting ever heavier as the sunlight streaming in through the window pressed down on them with a gentle heat. He thought, foolishly, that he had found it -at least one quiet moment where he could stop to breathe- but, as it always did, the past came roaring forward to catch up with him, as always.

He had it in his hand, he was clinging to it wildly: his first moment of peace since he'd left home. His hands slowly unclenched from fists, jaw finally slacked from the rigid position he'd forgotten he'd been holding it in. The relief was palpable.

Sirius concentrated stiffly on his breathing. _In...out...in...out...in...in...in...out._

His chest collapsed and grudgingly rose again, forcing his heard to keep pumping oxygen through his bruised body. Forcing himself to stay alive was the closest thing to peace he'd been able to find lately. Somewhere deep in his brain, a hollow laugh rung out. If only everyone at school could see the golden rebel now. Even James pretended not to notice when he got like this- that was the agreement their friendship was built on, really. Inadvertent support that protected them both.

The quiet of the still house, far too vast for the mere three people it contained, enveloped him in an eerie warmness that had nothing to do with the white heat that streamed in through the windows and pressed down on his eyelids. It was silent, too silent, so maddeningly silent...he felt the buzzing in his ears pick up, the voices in his memory grow louder as the ghosts of home began catching up to him...

And then, suddenly, a shattering of noise.

"GET BACK INTO THIS HOUSE IMMEDIATELY!"

The voice sliced through the silence of the day, muffled and distant but loud enough to jerk Sirius out of his stupor. It was a woman's voice, high and clear, shaking with a rage that echoed into Sirius's ears with memories of his own mother, her yellowing face trembling menacingly. It was enough to rocket him up into a sitting position, abandoning his faux-calm just as quickly as it had come on. That wasn't Mrs. Potter's voice, he would stake his life on it. Where had this voice come from, then? Voices like that did not exist in the Potter home.

Somewhere, a door slammed, cutting off the rest of the shout.

Sirius pulled himself across the mattress, groaning with the effort as he got onto his knees, peering wildly in the in the direction of the disturbances. His gaze landed, squinting into the blinding-white sunlight streaming through, on the square window above his bed. It was coming from outside.

Sirius brought his face to the window, nose nearly pressed against the cold glass, fighting to see past the brightness that greeted him.

The Potter's backyard stretched impressively before him, gentle slopes of alarmingly green grass that melted into a grove of proud and sturdy trees in the near distance, a ramshackle treehouse from James's childhood perched precariously on one of the thicker limbs. Directly below him, a patio was made up of deliberately placed square stones. A little-used brick fire pit sat staunchly at the center near a table big enough for the family and, at the edges, the borders were marked off by a bright array of lovingly-grown shrubbery and flowers that encompassed every color he'd ever known.

But no source of a shouting voice.

He didn't know what caused it, but Sirius found his vision pulled to the right.

A dark wooden fence, well-tended and tall, stood alertly on the property line between the Potter home and its neighbor. The property on the other side was a swirl of grey flagstones that centered around the fixture of the yard: a glittering pool that dipped below ground level, sparkling a deep mediterranean blue that sent the light bouncing in a million directions. A group of outdoor lounge chairs sat in a hastily arranged semicircle at the water's edge, looking as though they hadn't been properly used in years. Now that he thought about it, the entire backyard seemed to be simultaneously well-tended and yet uncared for. Very much, in fact, like the home he'd left behind.

Sirius didn't have long to ponder this thought because there it was: the streak of movement he'd been waiting for. And there she was, whoever she was, making her way across the yard in a tangle of long limbs and dark hair that spilled down past her shoulder blades.

He inadvertently found himself leaning forward, somehow shocked that he'd seen exactly what he'd been looking for. She couldn't have been the one who was shouting; she was too young, he could plainly see. But just based on the way she carried herself across the swirling flagstones to the edge of the blue water, based on the way he could see, even from this far, the way her hands had curled into determined fists, the way she never for a moment turned her face back to the house: Sirius could tell that she was not the one who's shout caught his attention.

She was screaming on the inside. He would know that stiff-shouldered chin-down pace anywhere. That girl was a hurricane waiting to happen.

And Merlin, it didn't help that her legs seemed to stretch for miles from the hem of her shorts until they finally reached the ground below.

The girl, whoever she was, folded her endless legs into themselves, crouching down until she was sitting at the edge of the pool where land became basin, letting the water lap against her ankles. Still, all he could see of her was the curtain of wild hair cascading down her back and those pale legs disappearing into a series of widening ripples. However, there was something about her. Something familiar, almost. Something he felt as if he ought to remember but simply couldn't.

Her hands found the bottom hem of her shirt and Sirius found all shame leaving him as he watched her, entranced, begin to pull absently at it, tugging it upward toward her torso.

He'd just barely seen a flash of white skin before a knock from behind him -jarringly closer than the sounds from earlier had been- jerked him out of his stupor. Startled, Sirius found his forehead connecting clumsily with the pane of glass he'd been looking through. A quick pang of stinging pain was all that kept him momentarily deaf to the sound of his best friend erupting into raucous laughter in the hallway.

"What the hell are you doing in here?" James roared, leaning against the doorframe, his glasses tipped precariously to the side as his shoulders continued to shake with laughter.

"Who is that?" Sirius asked dumbly, all he could think of, still not fully shaken from the stupor of hitting his head. Confused, James strode across the room, squinting his eyes with great effort as he attempted to see over the other boy and across the two yards.

Instantly, an unpleasant look of disgust crossed his expression that still sat there contently when he turned back to face Sirius.

"Merlin, Padfoot, could you sink any lower?" James asked, the smirk slowly returning to his face as he addressed the state of Sirius's confusion. "Please tell me you're not talking about bloody Marlene McKinnon."

* * *

**"I'm** telling you, I'm going to gouge my fucking eyes out." Sirius moaned, slumping into his chair at the dinner table nearly a quarter of an hour later.

"Language, Sirius," Mrs. Potter chastised gently, but a smile sat affectionately on her face as she stood distracted on the far end of the kitchen, stirring the finishing touches into a stew by hand, pridefully working over it in the way she was so proud of.

"Believe me, mum, he has a good reason," James jumped in, shoulders still jumping with boyish laughter as he carried a stack of plates from the counter to the table and began setting them out. "Old Paddy here caught sight -of all people, mind you- of Marlene bloody McKinnon across the fence and just about leapt through the window before he realized who it was."

"Ah," Mrs. Potter said simply, and it was evident that she, as well, was trying to hold in a bubble of surprised laughter. "Yes, I suppose people are always more beautiful before you know anything about them."

"Surprisingly poetic, Mum." James sighed with a good-natured roll of his eyes, sliding into his seat across from Sirius and sliding his hands upon his hair with frustration, trying to flatten and smooth it in the exact opposite fashion he used to charm girls at school. Here, in front of Sirius and his mother, there was no need to show off. They were rare, unfiltered moments.

"I've barely laid eyes on her since I was ten," Sirius cut in defensively. "I was tricked, if anything. Last time I saw her she was a twelve-year-old titchy little blonde thing throwing a tantrum in my parent's kitchen. She doesn't exactly run in the same crowd as us, mate."

"Say what you want," James chortled, twisting around in his chair impatiently as he waited for the food to be brought forward. "Consider yourself lucky if I don't mention this to Macdonald next time I see her."

"One word to Mary, and you're dead." Sirius retorted, fiddling with the fork sitting on his placemat. He felt an unprecedented twitching in his chest at the thought of it; a feeling he didn't have a name for, one that he'd decided meant he liked her.

It made the most sense anyway; it was the same content almost-happiness he felt when he was drunk and felt a muted, spark interest in a new girl. Except it had lasted for a few months now- longer than any of the others. He supposed that equated to what should have been prolonged interest or even the baseline of genuine feelings. The most he was capable of, anyway.

"Got that right," James agreed, much faster than usual, dropping his voice to a tone his mother couldn't overhear. "Since you and Mary started dating, Evans has no choice but to talk to me twice as much as usual. Wouldn't want to ruin your love life and sabotage my own, mate, would I?"

"Always thinking about yourself," said Sirius, another bout of laughter taking over his handsome face.

"Must be talking about my Jamesie," Mrs. Potter made her presence known again, bustling over to the table with a pot of stew, dangerously close to overflowing, that she placed gingerly in the center of the table. A house elf darted around her ankles all the while, stubby arms laden with various other plates with meats and vegetables and high piles of potatoes and gravy.

"Or the devil-across-the-way," James muttered, casting a conspicuous look toward the far wall of the kitchen and nodding his chin in the direction of the double glass doors at the end of the room, which were now showcasing a perfect view of the McKinnon yard.

"James," Mrs. Potter scolded, in a much harsher voice than she'd used with Sirius. "Watch your language. Marlene has had...a tough year. That whole family has."

"I'd have a hard time, too, if I had to lug around a set of stuck-up kids like the McKinnons." James muttered, rolling his eyes and drumming his fingers on the edge of the plate.

"James is just carrying some residual anger," Mrs. Potter said as she took her seat, raising an eyebrow in Sirius's direction as if they were the only two people in the room, ignoring her son temporarily. "We've lived next door to the McKinnons for almost twenty years now. Him and Marlene used to play together when they were little."

"Play?" James interjected with a scoff, screwing up his face and thinking back on some particularly jarring memory. "She's the one that used to plop herself onto the floor when we were six, pinch her own arm until she cried, and then tell her mum that I'd kicked her over. And if the rumors are true, she hasn't changed much since then."

"Rumors?" Sirius asked suddenly, perking his head up from where it had been perching casually on the heel of his hand.

"Death Eaters on the rise as far as I'm concerned," James shot out casually, wiggling his fingers in front of his face teasingly, bearing a lopsided grin.

"Do you ever get sick of starting trouble just for trouble's sake?" Mrs. Potter cut in with a laugh, looking over at her son with a sigh. "The McKinnons are...very high strung. Sirius, your family's known them even longer than we have, but we've been close to them for a long time as well. Very into the blood purity thing, as I'm sure you know. But I wouldn't ever go so far as to call them evil-"

"Except for Marlene-" James raised his voice, trying to drown out his mom, but being well-versed in her son's tactics, she did the same, raising an eyebrow and speaking louder still.

"That entire family has had it tough this year, especially Marlene. Her sister is getting married in a few weeks, her mother has been jumping through social circles like they're hoops, and her father just lost his job at the Ministry..." she sighed and began to ladle mashed potatoes onto everyone's plates, muttering the last part to herself with an annoyed undertone. "Not that you would know, with the way they're carrying on, holing up in their summer house, hosting tea, while real things are going on in the world..."

"As thrilled as I am that you're finally showing a bit of that Potter fire," James cut in with a laugh. "I think there might be a little of the pot calling the kettle black here, no?"

"What do you mean?" Mrs. Potter asked, looking up at him through an expression equal parts stressed and blank.

"Said the tea-planning woman from the kitchen of her summer home," James retorted, clearly enjoying the challenge he was delivering to her, though Sirius just straightened up in his seat, genuinely curious.

"It's different, James, and you know it. There are just certain things that need to be done."

"Yes, because the Wizengamot Founder's Ball and bi-weekly dinner parties with murderous-"

"Not all of them are _murderous_, for Merlin's sake, James you _can't _walk around saying things like that. You're going to get yourself-"

"Killed?"

"Into _trouble,_" Mrs. Potter huffed, clearly exasperated. "You're going to get yourself into trouble. I've told you time and time again that we are here to keep an eye on things. Alright? You've gotten that confession out of your father and I, and you'd do well to leave it at that. We're here to keep an eye on things."

"And why is that our job?" James pressed, leaning forward with a cocked eyebrow, clearly enjoying the fact that he boundaries were wilting even if it was only just so.

"Not 'our' job, James. My job. Your father's job. Your only job is to shadow your father at work, pretend that I don't notice when you come home from the Meadowses house drunk-"

"What's the catch here-"

"And to behave yourself when the McKinnons come over to tea on Saturdays-"

"There it is. There's the catch." James moaned, shooting her an injured look as if he'd just been sentenced to a punishment far worse than death.

"You wanted to help? Well, that's how you can help. The McKinnons are an extremely powerful family and they've been our friends for years, but we can't forget who else they rub elbows with. What with everything going on in the world right now...there's a lot of speculation about which way certain families will go. It's extremely important to get the right ones onto the right side."

"Is that what you're doing then?" Sirius burst out, earning surprised looks from both mother and son, both of whom seemed to have forgotten that he was sitting there listening. "Spying and recruiting?"

"Not even close," Mrs. Potter insisted, her stressed expression melting back into a motherly smile as she looked at him, exhaling with resign. "Like I said: we're just here to keep an eye on things."

"For who-" James tried to cut in again, but his mother wasn't giving him an inch anymore.

"Now, Sirius. What do you like on your potatoes?"

* * *

**It** was midnight and the walls were too beige.

The nondescript bedroom now felt strangely like a neutral-colored cell as Sirius sat propped against his headboard, head resting against the very window he'd been looking out earlier in the day, entranced.

The goddamn McKinnons. He remembered them perfectly well, and yet the image didn't seem to fit with the dark-haired ready-to-bolt figure he'd seen earlier. It just didn't fit.

But he knew Marlene McKinnon from his childhood: blonde hair tied up in a disgustingly pressed bow, sunken eyes observing from across the room, stick-up-the ass and eager to please the pureblood agenda. Always doing what her parents said, with that clench-jawed, silent expression...but then again, that had been him as well. Making fists, trying to remember which fork to use, hearing and regurgitating statistics about how blood purity made them better than the others, but also held them to higher stakes.

Ten-year-old Sirius and ten-year-old Marlene had been in the same boat for sure, but he had hardly laid eyes on her since then. She'd done what she was supposed to: gone down the Slytherin path, surrounded herself with the right people. It wasn't hard to overlook her when she was submerged in a crowd that he hated; it was safe to bet that James felt the same way. Even at a school so small, there had been no reason for their paths to cross. Why, then, could he not shake this feeling that there was something more to it? Something that he had to do, or know?

"Wotcher!" James's voice suddenly boomed from the hallway, followed a split second later by the kicking open of Sirius's bedroom door. "Heading off to bed already, Pads?"

"Yeah, I've decided to become an old woman in my spare time," Sirius scoffed, rolling his eyes and scooting over to make room on the edge of the bed where James was already bounding to, landing with a crash and sending his own glasses flying askew. "Sod off, Prongs."

"I can't help but feel gipped by this whole best-mate-moves in deal," James retorted, reaching over and punching Sirius in the shoulder. "When all you do is mope around in your bloody bedroom and gaze out windows like you're a dame in a painting."

"It's the first night, Prongs. Give it a rest, yeah? We've got the entire summer ahead of us."

"That we do, Paddy. That we do," James said with a content sigh, pushing Sirius even farther over and making himself at home, tucking his arms behind his head to use as support. "And a brilliant one it'll be. Merlin, I always wanted a brother."

Sirius found himself laughing in agreement and spending the rest of the evening awake swapping stories and nicking food from the kitchen, feeling much lighter than he had in years. However, at the mention of the word 'brother', he couldn't help but fall prey to a nagging sensation in the back of his mind, reminding him that somewhere out there he _did _have a brother...and he had no idea what would become of him now that he was here.

* * *

**A/N: Blackinnon. Jily. Updated every Monday. Reviews make the world go 'round. -A**


	2. Fabricated Wanderlust

**wanderlust** |ˈwändərˌləst| _noun_

a strong desire to travel _: a man consumed by wanderlust._

ORIGIN early 20th cent.: from German **_Wanderlust_**.

* * *

**Sirius's** first week at the Potter's summer home ebbed almost immediately into a steady pattern, drumming along to a steady beat of sleepless nights and endless, stretched-out days.

It became like clockwork after the second morning; James, shadowing early-morning at the Ministry, learned his lesson about his brotherly all-nighters and had begun retiring to bed earlier and earlier at the work week wore on. Sirius, in the spirit of a good houseguest, did the same.

Or, at the very least, he shut himself up in his room at the same hour and then spent five to seven hours succumbing to insomnia, staring up at the ceiling and wondering if never sleeping at all was a winning trade-off from the nightmares.

He slept some during the day -or, tried to- flung down onto a random couch or pillow-topped chair while he explored. And explore he did: ten bedrooms, two libraries, unused sitting rooms filled with awards and heirlooms long forgotten. His days were spent wandering the corridors in a half-strung out state, slowly learning the creaky floorboards and stocked kitchen cabinets, as promised, even better than James did.

His naps got longer as his comfort level grew, but no amount of pacing and searching could ease the sleeplessness he felt in his own bedroom. It wasn't, he suspected, a location-specific affliction.

Nevertheless, his answer was always the same when, gathering for dinner, sore but in high spirits, James and his mother retuned home and asked him about his day.

Things were great.

No, he hadn't heard any news from home.

He'd just woken up, honestly.

Yes, he was starting to feel much better. Thank you very much.

Of course he knew he was welcome here.

Actually, yeah, he'd managed to get a bit of his schoolwork done.

The lie became robotic after a while, told through shrugs and easy, lopsided grins. Never mind the fact that he hadn't had time to grab a single textbook on his way out of the house. They weren't asking in order to hear real answers; they were asking in order to put their own minds at ease. And they deserved that, at least, to know that they were helping. They were. Just not enough.

Saturday featured a shattering of the routine. Despite his grueling week of work, it was barely sunrise and the time James awoke fresh-faced and bounded down the hall to Sirius's room, throwing his shoulder against the door and appearing like a kid on Christmas morning holding, not presents, but two broomsticks in his arms. Captain Potter was not one to be discouraged, even by a corporate routine.

Sirius, strangely, didn't mind the interruption one bit- it had been worth it to trudge back into the house several hours later, coated in mud and running on nothing but adrenaline and the fiercely invigorating feeling that came from getting the wind knocked out of him by a best friend who, in the air, had finally stopped treating him like he was breakable.

It was a blissful few moments, the walk from the far end o f the backyard back to the main house- the two boys laughing carelessly for the first time in months, bumping shoulders, taunting each other for their shortcomings -though notably few in James's case- during the two-on-two unstructured match.

The smirks, however, quickly slid from their faces when they entered the usually warm and inviting kitchen to find it scrubbed floor to ceiling and organized with an unfamiliar stillness, the family elf perched atop the table, bustling to arrange a particularly bland bouquet of flowers into the centerpiece, freshly picked from the back garden. The boys abruptly remembered what day it was.

Mrs. Potter was standing over the stove, muttering to herself incoherently as she dropped a variety of herbs into the pot of tea she was about to put on.

"Poisoning the guests, Mum?" James boomed as he entered, striding into the kitchen and throwing the back door open, leaving a trail of mud in his wake as he kicked off his boots, causing her to jump in surprise. "Not that I mind, but I didn't think it was quite your style."

"You scared me. Don't _do _that," Mrs. Potter gasped, clasping a hard to her chest and trying to regulate her breathing. Her attention then turned to the muddy boots sitting on the floorboards and the lines etched into her forehead deepened. "And don't do _that _either, James, you know better."

James just rolled his eyes good-naturedly and fished out his wand from the inner pocket of his robes, muttering an incantation and waving it over the mess in a flash of blue light. The floor and both of the boys were looking presentable before Mrs. Potter could even formulate a moan about her son being underage; in a village like this, the magic was so concentrated that it was unlikely to raise any eyebrows in the first place.

"And viola! We are presentable," James insisted with a cheeky grin aimed directly at his mother. "What can we do to make your day easier? Put us young, strapping men to work."

"Well for starters, you can-" Mrs. Potter's grateful instructions were cut short by a sound from the front of the house: a sharp rapping on the surface of heavy wood. "Get the door. For starters, you can get the door- with manners, James!"

The last part was called after him in a motherly panic and was received with a concerningly mischievous laugh. Mrs. Potter needn't have worried, however. Her son reappeared moments later, looking perfectly respectable, with two solemn-faced figures in tow.

"Right on time," Mrs. Potter said by way of greeting to the newcomers, wiping her hands clean on a dishtowel and smiling warmly in their direction. "Boys, you remember Gavin and Colleen?"

The two, both young adults, stood huddled together in the doorway, standing tall and with formal stiffness. The first, a boy standing a head taller that either James or Sirius, had a shock of dark red hair, a thick jawline, and a face that automatically crested into a menacing expression. The girl was smaller but older, nearly twenty, with white-blonde hair that curled around her freckle-spattered face.

"Not as if the walk was too terrible," said the boy, Gavin, his face lifting into an easier smile as he stepped into the kitchen, edging toward the table and gripping the back of one of the chairs.

"Speak for yourself," Colleen piped up, her smile more forced and not quite making it to her eyes. "The heat is twice as unbearable as last year."

"It's going to be a hot one," Mrs. Potter agreed, her warm smile slipping only slightly, clearly jarred by the formalness of the exchange, turning to her son and Sirius for escape. "James, say hello like a proper human. Sirius, you remember the older two McKinnons, I'm sure?"

While James did his best un-coifed antithesis-of-a-pureblood wave, Sirius wound up sputtering in both agreement and greeting, stepping forward to shake Gavin's hand while Colleen stood idly by and lifted her chin a spare few inches to suffice as a hello.

"I'm surprised he remembers," Colleen said with what Sirius supposed was meant to be a joking tone as she crossed to the table and took a seat, turning over her teacup as a sign that she was ready to be served. "I feel like I haven't seen you properly since before you even started school and now here you are- last year beginning, isn't it?"

"Yeah," Sirius said with a quick shrug, taking a seat beside James as the two of them claimed chairs and fiddling with the frayed edge of his placemat. "Same as, uh, Marlene. I haven't really made it to the big events in the past few years. I suppose I've got a reputation as a bit of a black sheep because of it."

"Hardly," Gavin cut in with a laugh, looking at Sirius as if they were both on the inside of a clever joke when clearly they were not. "I'd skip a few balls to go abroad as well. Where haven't you been? Let's see...last year on the Anniversary of Salazar...Paris, right?"

"Paris?" Sirius echoed quickly, confusion quickly clouding his face, brow furrowed deeply. Under the table, James gave him a quick kick of inquiry as well. "I've never been to Paris, no. Actually I was-"

"Russia!" Colleen piped up, leaning her elbows onto the table with genuine interest. "It was Russia, wasn't it? I remember because I made that clever little joke to your mother when she was telling me all about it, do you remember Gavin? The one about-"

"Russia," said Sirius, his head physically nodding slowly but inwardly spinning around. "My mother told you I was abroad in Russia?"

And suddenly, it all clicked into place for him.

Last winter during the Anniversary of Salazar Ball, Sirius had nipped out of the house early in the morning, leaving his suit and tie behind and gone to Remus's home in the countryside for a weekend, coming home smelling like rubbing alcohol with dark bags under his eyes. And yet, according to his mother, he'd been touring and studying in Russia.

He'd always wondered in the back of his mind why nobody outside of his family ever seemed to rib him for his refusal to attend the Pureblood social calendar, and now it finally made sense. All of those times he'd skipped the parties or got too drunk beforehand to attend or flat out refused to accompany his parents- they'd told people he was abroad. Researching, maybe. Taking in the art. It seemed like the type of thing his mother would come up with.

They were so embarrassed to have a son with a refusal to uphold their social commitments that they'd been lying about him being out of the country for...it had to be almost four years now, since they stopped trying to force him into showing up for fear of him ruining things. It certainly explained a lot. How quaint the other family thought the Blacks must be, sending their son -improperly sorted, such a troublemaker at school- all around Europe for the winters and summers. _Getting it all out of his system,_ he could hear, the thought ringing out in his mother's harsh voice. _So that when he's ready to join us here he can ascend to the top. _

It may even have been something he'd heard from her once. If only he'd paid better -or better yet, any- attention.

"Why shouldn't she?" Colleen continued, raising her eyebrows at him curiously.

"We heard that it was a lovely trip," interjected Gavin as well, nodding in Sirius's direction.

"It was," Sirius said after a long minute, finding that his head automatically nodded and a polite smile was rising onto his face, forced but present. "One of the best trips yet."

James sat by his side, absently toying with the spoon in his hand and trying not to snort at the exchange. It was often true, at school, that James would be the -albeit, slightly- better behaved one. They both got into trouble, for sure, but Sirius was the reckless one. The one who made too many inappropriate comments. The one that girls pulled into empty classrooms while James was the more proper one, taking them out to lunches and having long given up crassness for the sake of crassness.

Even through his carefully cultivated rebellion, his parents wouldn't let Sirius be the shame of the Blacks. Not yet, not until they had to. He wondered where they'd say he was this summer. Italy, maybe? Somewhere warm for sure. They couldn't even allow him the freedom to leave with dignity. They were going to keep their masks up as long as possible, let everyone in the Pureblood community keep on thinking that he was someone to be impressed by.

While James had merely shrugged off Pureblood life through his parents' refusal to push it on him, Sirius abhorred it openly. But that didn't mean he wasn't a part of it. He'd been through the whole thing as a child: Learn the Sacred 28. Learn the waltzes. Wear the ties. Know which fork to use. Pick your life path carefully: You were assigned a spouse at 17 and either got married before you turned 21 or you were considered hapless.

Actually, Sirius thought, that was no longer true. There was an arranged-marriage loophole that had been rapidly emerging throughout the Pureblood families in recent years. It was more of an option for girls, he supposed, the less desirable ones. The ones that weren't the polished and coifed ones that had suitors vying after them. It was called "alternative service", and, though Sirius had heard the term tossed around at the spare few dinner parties he'd attended and had never bothered to ask what it meant, he had a pretty good idea about who the service would be in the name of. A last ditch effort to shield a family name if he ever saw one.

But besides all that, the bottom line was quickly becoming clear. The McKinnon siblings, despite being the children of a couple who'd been close to the Potters for years, had all but ignored James since the moment he'd answered the door for them. James, despite his blood status and parentage, was not one of them. Sirius, because of his upbringing and despite his most valiant efforts, was. In their eyes anyway.

"So," Mrs. Potter said to the McKinnon siblings as a way of transition, finally taking her seat at the head of the table and motioning the house elf to come over and begin serving tea. "I heard from your mother that she and your father were at the Ministry this weekend having a meeting with the Malfoy family and that they won't be joining us until next week...but where has Marlene gotten off to? I feel like I didn't see her last summer at all either."

"Marlene," said Colleen, clearly jarred as she pressed her lips into a thin, white line and looked to her brother for support, some of the color leaving her face. "Well you know she's been a bit...difficult, let's say, in recent months. Some of the ideas she's gotten into her head...She's taking some time away to gather herself. Grow up a little, if you know what I mean."

"I don't quite-" Mrs. Potter started in, frowning only slightly. The gears in her head were almost visibly spinning.

"Funnily enough that we were just talking about traveling, Sirius!" Gavin cut in smoothly, shooting an easy smile around the room. "Marlene took the Floo out to Prague two days ago. We have a few cousins there."

"Really? Prague?" Sirius questioned, doing his best to look purely interested even though a knowing grin was threatening to break out across his face.

He'd seen Marlene -bloody noisy as she was- just that morning for a brief moment, walking across the backyard of the McKinnon house just long enough for him to do another unwitting double take.

Perhaps perpetuating traveling myths was not just a Black family tradition.

"I've been there," Sirius lied easily, the smile on his face secretly meant for mocking but real, at the very least. "Twice actually. I can't wait to hear all about it. I'm sure she'll come back with some _excellent_ stories."

The tight-smiling nervous glances that the McKinnons exchanged were priceless, and suddenly Saturday tea wasn't as boring as he'd originally imagined.

* * *

"**And** I thought it was hard to outdo her start-of-term parties down on the Quidditch pitch after hours," Sirius said, shaking his head with a slight laugh as he and James approached on foot the house of one Miss Dorcas Meadowes, who had a well-deserved reputation for throwing 'small get-togethers' that were never small but always wound up getting some mismatched pair together.

"I told you this sodding village wasn't all bad," James insisted, raising a dramatic prepare-yourself eyebrow as he took hold of the door handle and pushed, sweeping the heavy oak open to reveal a sight that could only be referred to as a beautiful catastrophe.

The Meadowes lived two blocks up from the Potters, in an unassuming, stately home built entirely of red bricks and black shutters. Mr. and Mrs. Meadowes preferred to take their vacations in the mountains, in the family's other vacation home. Dorcas, in a sharp comparison, preferred to take her vacations alone, on the rocks with a twist of lime.

"Do my eyes deceive me?" rang out a voice, slurred, high-pitched, and by all accounts overjoyed. Sirius and James turned their attention to the marble-floored foyer -packed impossibly tight with bodies of all the neighborhood teenagers and plenty more to spare, the smell of alcohol overpowering all other senses from the get-go- and found Dorcas herself, tottering precariously down the twisted staircase, waving a goblet in the air. "Has Sirius Black finally decided to join us here at Chalet Meadowes?"

Sirius set his jaw unconvincingly into a line, trying to suppress the smirk that was forming there. James had no such qualms and was doubled over in laughter by the time Dorcas finally reached them at the door, one of her shoes threatening to slip off and send her topping backwards.

"Good luck," James muttered to Sirius with a wink, clapping his friend hard on the back as she approached, not bothering to hide his teasing. "She's got it bad for you, mate."

"Who's got who?" Dorcas hiccuped, sliding her arms around Sirius's neck in a lingering hug that evolved quickly into him supporting her as she swayed, giant blue eyes looking directly into his but never quite registering into focus.

"Sirius has got you," James shouted as he started to back away, grinning madly as he cut a path over to the kitchen to steal himself a drink. He increased his volume as he got farther, finishing with an accusing point in Sirius's direction before he disappeared. "But he's also got Macdonald!"

"Mary Macdonald," Dorcas muttered in that high, breathy voice of hers. "I don't understand you, Black."

"Is that so?" Sirius asked, still pushing back his smirk as he led her, half uncomfortable and wholly amused, into the adjacent sitting room. "What about me don't you understand, oh-drunken Miss Meadowes?"

"Mary Macdonald," Dorcas repeated, letting herself fall with a laugh onto one of the couches though her face quickly morphed back into a scowl that could rival one who'd just eaten a raw lemon. "You're _Sirius Black_. Yeah?"

"I suppose I am," laughed Sirius, shaking his head incredulously as he watched her drop onto the couch, grabbing a half full bottle of whiskey that someone'd abandoned on the fireplace mantle and taking a generous swig from it. It was like stepping back into the life he liked to pretend he really had -the one that his school reputation was largely centered around- hearing someone talking to him like that. "Last time I checked anyway."

"Right!" Dorcas insisted, hiccuping twice before she looked at him imploringly, clearly frustrated that he wasn't understanding.

"I...like Mary," Sirius said carefully, smirking as he leaned against the wall and took a few more swigs of the alcohol, feeling the liquid burning a familiar path down to his stomach, leaving a trail of warmth. There was something to be said for ego boosts like this; he couldn't deny it if his life depended on it.

"She's a...you know." Dorcas pressed on, her eyes getting too big for her face as she leaned forward and stage-whispered the word that in her eyes was so unimaginable. "_Virgin." _

Sirius felt his face drop, and suddenly he wasn't enjoying Dorcas's company as much as he was the moment before. It was a sore subject for him, if he was being honest. Five, nearly six months of dating and he couldn't look Dorcas in the eye and call her a liar.

"Some guys find that extremely enticing," he said finally, shooting her a defensive look as if he wasn't in the least bit bothered by the fact that he'd been spending all his time with someone who encouraged him to believe in the ridiculous notion that all good things would come to those who waited.

"You don't," laughed Dorcas, folding her arms over her chest and leaning back into the couch cushions, heavy-lidded eyes slowly forcing themselves to close as Sirius stood by and watched her, draining his stolen bottle as he went.

There were two rules that Sirius Black held in the utmost highest regard: he did not date and he did not wait. And he'd been breaking them both for Mary bloody Macdonald.

It should have felt satisfying, he supposed. He should have gained a sense of accomplishment or something by now, shouldn't he? He hadn't, but that didn't mean he wanted to ditch Mary. As cliche as it sounded, she _was _different, somehow. Different should have equated to feelings, should it've? Never having actually experienced them for himself, Sirius supposed that's what it was. Falling for her or whatever nonsense girls liked to prattle on about. It was entirely possible that he just didn't want to lose another person...but he pushed that thought out of his mind as quickly as it entered.

He hadn't gotten bored of her yet. As far as he could tell, that was the best it got for anybody nowadays.

"Maybe I do," Sirius insisted after a long moment, finally coming out of his thoughts. But it was too late; Dorcas had fallen asleep on the sofa, one of her shoes finally detaching from her ankle and hitting the floor, her chest rising and falling in even bursts.

Somewhere in the house, something made of glass broke. Sirius laughed, giving Dorcas one last patronizing look before he turned around and reentered the party, headed straight for James and the liquor.

* * *

"**Are** you alright?"

It was dark out, and Sirius was lying flat on his back, the world around him spinning into a reservoir of colors that didn't make sense and sounds the echoed like they were underwater.

"Hm?" he managed to ask as a response to the faceless question, his voice comprised of one giant slur, uneasily trying to sit up with exuberant amounts of effort before he was able to place his location as the sidewalk outside of the Potters home. "Yeah. Yeah. M'fine."

"So then you're just bloody insane," the voice rang out again, starting to bubble into focus, and with a start Sirius realized that it was coming from his direct left.

He swung his head to the side, the whole street tilting again into a nauseating blur, and it took a long minute of trying not to be sick before he was able to lock in on the figure that was crouched beside him.

"You're insane," he fired back childishly, laughing at his own supposed cleverness. "Told you. M'fine."

"You look completely fine," the voice scoffed, sarcasm laced into every syllable.

Sirius's eyes focused and suddenly he was staring into a pair of brown eyes, level with his own. There was hair, too- dark, pulled back. A splatter of freckles, maybe. The necessary balance to look down toward her mouth did not exist, but he somehow just knew that she was frowning. He stayed focused on the eyes as they inspected his own, trying to use them as a steady point to rope in the rest of his brain.

"M'fine," Sirius said for a third time. He knew those eyes. How did he know those eyes? They blinked at him -maybe with annoyance, maybe with concern- two, dark pools of melted chocolate.

"Well then you should probably get inside," the voice said, not so cracked around the edges this time.

"Wonderful idea," Sirius slurred with pompous sarcasm, rolling his eyes at her as if she'd just suggested he crown himself King of England. With a groan of effort, he latched first one and then both hands onto the fence he'd been supporting his head with and then pulled himself -rocking back and forth precariously- to his feet. "See? Fine."

"You should take this," said the figure, rising up easily, no longer at his level but a full head shorter, looking up at him with those eyes and holding out, of all things, a full water bottle.

"I know you," Sirius said suddenly, flinging his index finger toward the eyes-with-a-body accusingly, sputtering as he tried, still, to place them.

"No, you don't," the voice answered, with a hard-edged laugh, still holding out the water bottle in his direction insistently.

"But you're Marlene," snapped Sirius, drunken ego driving him to insist that he was right, no matter what answer he'd just received.

"Yeah, you've got me there," Marlene sighed back, shaking her head at him impatiently. Is this how it felt to be Dorcas?

Marlene started to come into an off-center focus as she stood before him. And Merlin, she did not look happy. Through his eyes, she was a mess of dark hair and track pants, but it was the same curious situation as before: he didn't need to look at her to know that she was frowning. Inconvenienced. Unimpressed.

"Marlene McKinnon," Sirius shouted, throwing his arms out to the side with a magnificently overdramatic eye roll. "You are bloody everywhere lately."

"Do you want the water or not?" She was not to be swayed by his antics.

"Well," slurred Sirius, reaching forward and grabbing the water bottle out of her hands with a flourish, calling over his shoulder as he left her out on the sidewalk making exasperated faces and looking over her shoulder in case someone should witness the atrocity that was him attempting to walk. "I hope you're enjoying Prague, anyway."

By the time he made it down the path, wrenched the front door open, and turned around to observe the street outside, she was gone.

* * *

**A/N: Blackinnon. Jily. Updated every Monday. Reviews make the world go 'round. -A**


	3. Déjà Vu

déjà vu |ˌdā zh ä ˈvoō|

**noun**

a feeling of having already experienced the present situation.

ORIGIN early 20th cent.: French, literally 'already seen.'

* * *

**Sirius** Black woke up promptly at noon that Sunday, in his clothing from the night before, with a pounding headache and holding a drained water bottle nestled into the crook of his arm.

He awoke with a start, jumping into a sitting position so quickly that his headache doubled, looking around the room in a familiar panic that began to ebb away and subside within moments, as soon he he was able to place himself in the Potter's guest bedroom, heartbeat slowly steadying back down to something normal. Feeling foolish, he flopped back down onto the bed, burying his face deep into the feathered stuffing of his pillow and tried to piece together the events that'd transpired the evening previous.

With a groan, Sirius grabbed for a second pillow and pulled it over the top of his head insistently, determined to block out the rest of the sunlight that was streaming in through the window, sending himself into a muffled cocoon of warm air and broken memories that came flooding back to him once he concentrated hard enough.

There was...Dorcas, of course, that was a given. Passing out on her sitting room couch just before he left her...James, walking up to him holding a pair of drinks from the Meadowes's expensive stash...Dancing? Surely not. A few red-faced girls who'd tried to ask him how his summer was going...And then...Dorcas again? Was it even possible for her to be awake?

But it had to have been true because he remembered -through a haze, his headache worsening- the flash of blonde hair that accompanied her presence, her high voice telling him...some garbled jumble of words he couldn't remember for the life of him. A pair of pink lips pulling closer and closer to him...oh Merlin, he couldn't have. Not on his first night out. Mary'd have his head on a plate...

With a sigh of relief, Sirius lifted a hand and rubbed insistently at his temple, as if that would coax the memory forward. Whether he'd just discovered some new neurological miracle or if it was because he was starting to sober up, the memory did indeed start to surface, rippling as if he was watching it from the bottom of a lake- too bright and too loud, but moving in slow motion. He could see himself, he could remember...pulling away from Dorcas, the look of anger and insult crossing her face, her hand dramatically pointing him out toward the door.

And then a pair of brown eyes hovering beside him, crinkled around the edges, dark bags underneath.

He cold see them but he couldn't place them; so vividly amber in his distorted memory that he could scarcely call them brown at all. They were familiar enough but he didn't know from where, and suddenly the rest of his night wasn't as important to line up. Maybe it wasn't the eyes so much as the look behind them. A barely-controlled anger, a suppressed look of contempt, and damn it all if he couldn't remember the rest of her face.

That pair of eyes was like the Cheshire cat's smile- the last thing to disappear, floating ethereally in his mind, calling to be attached to a body. It was frustrating, really, the way they stood out in his mind- just two brown circles looking at him, squinting slightly, as if they were trying to work out a puzzle of their own. But he just couldn't...

There was a splash from outside.

Sirius sat up.

His face was up at the window before he knew what he was looking for, line of sight swinging automatically into the McKinnon yard as if this had been waiting to hear a commotion over there and was just now letting out a breath he didn't know he'd been holding.

The glassy surface of the pool had been broken, sending choppy ripples spiraling out in a million directions. There was nothing for a long minute, besides the rocking water lapping over the cement edges of the basin. But then, just like that: there she was.

A dark head of hair broke the surface and Sirius found himself leaning forward with a start, squinting suspiciously into the neighboring property, searching for anything that would jog his memory. He watched as her hands found the edge of the pool, sputtering water away from her face as she pulled herself up and collapsed onto the flagstones that made up the yard.

It felt oddly personal, more than if he'd been in the yard with her, watching like this and yet not in the morbid sense that one would suspect. It was a quiet kind of hypnosis, watching who people became when nobody else was around. The idiosyncrasies, the ticks. Not that he'd ever watched that closely before, or that he would admit to watching her at all. But his entire life up to this point had been largely observational- learning the Pureblood waltzes as a child, seeing the colorful skirts sweeping across the floors; watching for, in the way his parents did, who the real allies were: whose smiles stretched too tightly, didn't make it all the way up to their eyes. It was easier to get to know people, in some ways, when you didn't actually know them.

Marlene crossed the yard, and Sirius saw her pause to look around- at her own house for the longest but then side to side as well, shoulders tensed up and standing starkly still for a long moment before she finally crossed the patio to one of the plush lawn chairs sitting at the water's edge.

It wasn't until she turned to the side and exposed her left arm to his line of sight that he noticed the stark white bandage wrapped carefully around her arm, from wrist to elbow.

Apparently satisfied that she was at last alone, Marlene's hand went to the top of the bandage and she began to upwind it gingerly, taking care to gracefully unwrap her pale skin fold by fold, the thin material coiling into a neat pile by her side, practically glowing white in the sunlight.

Around and around she unwrapped it, his mind churning along with the motion, feeling another out of place memory rattling around in his head until suddenly he wasn't in the Potter's spare bedroom anymore:

_The gray-silk walls were covered with bright red banners with gold accents and tacky posters of Muggle girls in bikinis that he'd gotten at a garage sale for practically nothing at all. It was late- two in the morning probably, but Sirius was awake and sitting up in bed, looking around at the ostentatious decorations. _

_The clock on the wall was ticking away the hours as he stared straight ahead at the wall in front of him; the posters and pictures, he realized for the first time, truly were stuck there forever. They were so unbelievably tacky, chosen in such rushed, poor taste, and yet there was something so satisfying about knowing they would be there for years, even after he was long gone. _

_And he would be soon, wouldn't he? Long gone. It wasn't something he'd dared to say out loud, to himself in his own head, even, but there was some pull deep inside his stomach that had been telling him for quite some time now- one day in the near future he was going to be long gone. _

_A floorboard creaked, and Sirius felt himself tense up. It was an old habit, a tick at this point really, but his right hand flew protectively to cover his left forearm. Not tonight, not tonight, not tonight. He was so exhausted. He needed to sleep, he knew that much. But the floorboard had creaked..._

_Moving on autopilot, Sirius grabbed for his pillow, slid it out from the safe enclosing of the pillowcase. The pillow was tossed to the side, but the swatch of grey silk stayed clutched in his hand. Without a second thought, he ripped it. He kept ripping until the whole thing was a zig-zag of tattered fabric. One long, jagged line of pillowcase-turned-bandage._

_Staring at his door now, he found himself wrapping the material around his arm. Again, and again, and again. He tapped it with his wand to keep it in place. That should do it. That should ho-_

_His bedroom door began to creak open. _

Sirius was snapped out of his reverie of thinking and with a jolt realized that he was still at the Potter's, still staring intrusively into the McKinnon's yard. His hand found the water bottle sitting long-forgotten atop his mattress; found it and closed around it. He was out the door before he knew where his legs were taking him.

* * *

"**McKinnon**!" Sirius shouted, hand lifting in a fist to knock on the surface of the heavy wooden fence that divided the two properties, no longer to see over it now that he was directly at its side. His knocking continued, hoping he would at least get her attention that way if his shouting proved ineffective. "Oy! McKinnon!"

He opened his mouth to shout again, but was cut off when he suddenly heard a snapped:

"What?" Her voice was clipped and formal, more like Colleen's than he would have thought possible, and for a moment he didn't actually believe it was her. But then there, through a knothole in the fencepost, he saw it: a single brown eye, amber in the blinding sunlight, hovering right where she could see him. It was the same one; his theory had been right: crinkling around the edges, eyelashes dark and drawing a natural rim around. "Are you knocking on my _fence_?"

"How's Prague?" Sirius fired back almost instantly, smirk playing across his face.

"You used that one last night," her voice rose up in a scoff at the end, but not a laugh. Maybe it'd just been years since he'd heard her speak, but it was flatter than he'd expected it to sound. It was less alive than should belong to somebody who looked so entirely wild. After a long moment, she sighed, relenting to play along. "How's China?"

"China? Is that really where they're saying I am this time?"

"Not yet, but I'm sure they'll run out of countries eventually. You never know when somebody might ask you about the finer points of chopstick use and sightseeing."

"Well damn. I should make it a point to brush up on my Asian history then," he said with an eye roll, expecting her to laugh. She didn't.

"Can I help you with something or are you just here to tete-a-tete small talk?" Her tone was clipped again; all business, the wall pulling back ups. Again, the very last thing he would have expected, especially from someone like her. Someone who used to break china plates at Pureblood dinners just for sport and still ran across her backyard just to toss herself into the pool.

"I came to return this," he said, lifting the water bottle in his hands up high until it sat bridged between the two properties. After a moment of initial hesitation, he saw a set of pale fingers appear beside his, coaxing the bottle from his grasp without ever making contact. The brown eye blinked. "What were you doing out so late, since you clearly weren't drinking? Do you often carry around bottles of water in case teenage drunkards cross your path?"

"Oh, all the time. It's my life's work," she fired back, and there could have been a laugh there somewhere if she had let one appear: hard around the edges, but entirely imaginable. "I find the greatest satisfaction in peeling incoherent blokes from the front walk."

"What dedication," he praised, sarcasm dripping through his tone though his attention was fixed now on the fence itself. On the way the wood cracked and spun off into patterns, telling its own age. He couldn't tell why he was concerned for her, but he let the question slip from his mouth anyway. "In reality though- have you slept?"

"I'm about to," Marlene relented after a long moment, and though he could only see her eye he could tell that she'd jerked her head backwards, in the direction of the lawn chairs.

"In the middle of the day? Outside?"

Silence from the other side of the fence. Again, he opened his mouth to try:

"I should say, McKinnon, I'm no Healer but it's entirely possible that the root of your unpleasantness stems from lack of sl-"

"PADFOOT!" Sirius jumped at the calling of his name and turned back toward the house- half startled and half filled with a feeling of unplaceable guilt as if he'd been caught in the act of doing something unsavory.

James was standing in the doorway of the house, half leaning out of it, a huge, lopsided grin filling his face that matched perfectly in tandem with his lopsided spectacles.

"What are you doing all the way out here, prat?" James pressed, smile clearly showing that he was excited about something.

"Tending to the bloody gardens. What do you think I'm doing? Nothing." Sirius called back, smirk automatically crossing his own face at the interaction.

"I've got a surprise for you!" his best friend called, stepping out into the yard fully and pulling the sliding door open wider behind him as he exited, visibly pleased with himself and he took his place out in the yard.

"What are you-" Sirius had no sooner gotten out the first half of his sentence before he was thrown into silence again, a genuine grin lighting up his face when he saw a second figure -entirely tiny in comparison- step out onto the patio behind James. "Mary! What are you doing here?"

Mary Macdonald was, by all accounts and for all intensive purposes, a ray of walking sunshine, at least compared to the gloom and monotony that had been holding reign over the summer so far.

She stood beside James, nearly bouncing up and down on the balls of her feet, with a smile so astronomical and so at home on her face that Sirius couldn't help grinning back at her automatically, even before he'd fully registered she was there. And then, just as quickly as he took the first step toward her, he broke into a jog, trainers tearing up the grass beneath him as he cut a path to her. Through the fence, he was sure he heard Marlene muttering something about unpleasantness and felt a quick wave of defensiveness dart through him, but it didn't matter. He was already running to Mary, suddenly filled with childlike energy, a lopsided smile finding its old place above his chin.

"Are you surprised?" Mary asked, excitement evident in her voice as it always was. Mary Macdonald wasn't raised to play mind games a day in her life: she always held her emotions out in the palm of her hand and was unusually adept at figuring out others' as well. Mary made things simple, and Sirius didn't appreciate how much he'd...well, appreciated it until this very moment.

"What in the bloody hell are you doing here, Mare?" he asked, pulling her into a rib-crushing hug for a long minute, grinning down at her before looking over her head -it was a feat easily accomplished seeing as she roughly measured up to Sirius's chest, and only just- and shooting James a look. His best friend just waggled his eyebrows mischievously and then, with a conspiratorial grin, disappeared back into the house to give them a minute alone.

"James wrote," Mary said, falling into the hug with a squeeze before pulling back, having to tilt her chin skyward in order to look him in the eyes with her own: a murky hazel that were slightly too big for her face. "Said you seemed a bit of of sorts lately. I thought you could use a surprise."

Something that might have been guilt bubbled up in the pits of Sirius's stomach. Of course she would drop everything to come cheer him up, even when he hadn't written in weeks. That was the kind of person she was; so sweet at times that it could have given him a toothache. It was an impossible standard of making others happy that he knew he could never measure up to; it was frustrating at times, just to be around her knowing that she'd just flooed halfway across the country when he'd been too lost in his own head to pick up a quill and let her know about it.

"Well color me surprised," said Sirius, his smile remaining as a twisted fixture at the corner of his mouth as he ran a thumb over her forehead, pushing away one of the coal-colored curls that had fallen astray during the hug. "I'm...I'm glad you're here."

And as she smiled up at him, he realized that he really meant it.

* * *

"**I thought** you said it was a _clubhouse_," Mary hissed at James, shifting anxiously in her position under Sirius's arm as the three of them approached one of the central buildings of the Pureblood community: an impressive structure rising out of gray stones and flickering in the glow of lanterns and sconces that were illuminating the outside of the building.

"Sod off, Macdonald, it's just what they call the place," James sighed good-naturedly, reaching over and ruffling her hair in a big-brother-like fashion, causing her to squeak and smooth it back down, eyes darting uncomfortably to the door just before they crossed the threshold. "My mum doesn't cook on Sundays. Save starving, this is our only option."

"You look fine," Sirius insisted, raising an eyebrow and looking down at her with an encouraging smile. "I used to get dragged to places like this all the time, it's not nearly as intimidating as-"

"Name?" they were cut off by the appearance of a house elf, only a couple of heads shorter than Mary, and looking oddly cleaner and more coifed than the common elves that did the scrub-work in the typical home.

"I'm sorry?" Mary paused uncertainly in the doorway, regarding the strange creature with a doe-eyed expression like a deer caught in headlights, regarding it with a tentative curiosity. Going red in the face, Sirius realized with a start that she may never have seen one before. "Um, my name is Mary-"

"Family name," the elf clicked, shooting her a glare of impatience so unguarded that Sirius almost took a step forward and kicked at the elf out of angry habit. It was clear that the house elf knew who it wasn't meant to answer to.

"Bla- fuck, Potter." Sirius snapped, uncharacteristically eager to drop his family name in a strive for power but remembering at the last moment that the seating was done by reversed family tables and, in his case, wings. "Potter. Seat us at the Potter table."

Behind him, James gave a snort of amusement and didn't move fast enough to dodge the elbow that Sirius aimed at him when Mary wasn't paying attention.

The dining room was packed tightly, luxuriously large tables draped in satin tablecloths glowing with candles, the flickering light drifting upward along with the echoing conversation to the dome ceiling above: a cacophony of twisted gold and painted scenes that held up a skylight showcasing nothing but star-studded darkness at the moment.

The house elf from the entrance foyer led the party of three to the front left corner, to a table set elaborately and set off to the side: a placement that would seem unassuming in any other situation and that didn't seem to phase James for even a moment. Nevertheless, Sirius found his eyes side-wandering to the center of the room, where a series of tables were set on an up-spiraling series of tiers crowned by -at the top platform- the empty and seldom-used table that he knew belonged to his parents and cousins.

When every table in the room was considered to be elite, the more detailed hierarchy within the class became much more obvious, the lines more sharply drawn.

"You've got to be kidding me," Mary sighed, staring down at her place setting with a boggle-eyed stare of confusion, looking to James for help. "How am I supposed to figure out how to eat?"

"Don't ask me. I almost never come to this stuffy place," the messy-haired boy scoffed in return, reaching across Mary so that he could punch Sirius on the arm, pulling him out of the reverie of thought he'd been in. "Oy, Padfoot. You're the one that went to sodding etiquette classes."

"Yeah, when I was eight," Sirius scoffed in retort, rolling his eyes and casting a look over the elaborate utensils that lay before them.

The plate was easiest enough, glowing round in the center of it all, but that was where the similarities to normal place settings ended. Five different goblets, ranging in size sat in a semicircle at the top of his plate. At least eleven forks, varying between two and seven prongs, lay in a twisted pattern weaving through the cups as if they were a serpentine creature. Two spoons, three napkins, and a spiraling glass contraption that appeared to have no use at all besides decoration sat off too the left.

Mary looked like she was going to have a heart attack. James was looking side to side at the families sitting around them with a raised eyebrow, as if trying to discern whether or not he could get away with winging it.

"It's not that hard," Sirius said, with a grudging groan after a long moment of watching his best mate and girlfriend puzzling over the forks, absently poking over at them.

"You're kidding me," James laughed, looking right over Mary's head at Sirius, a teasing smirk sitting on his face. "They really beat that stuff into your brain, don't they?"

"That they do," said Sirius grimly, rolling his eyes but relenting with a quick smirk. "It's, uh...it's not so hard. Picture the forks as a snake, and reach for the weakest spots first, like the ne-"

"Snakes don't have weak spots," A voice suddenly interrupted from behind them, and Sirius found his head whipping around, face flushing for a reason he couldn't put his finger on.

Marlene McKinnon was standing beside their table, looking polished in a way that Mary, with her midnight curls and Muggle dress, never seemed to be. It was a comparison Sirius never knew he was capable for making until he unwittingly did, but then it was too late. Marlene stood proud and tall, chin tilted upward at a sharp angle, her dark hair pulled tight into a knot at the back of her head and wearing a Slytherin-green dress that had just one long sleeve and material that clung to her curves and fell in a wave to her knees.

"Oh, good, Marlene's here," James grumbled, only taking a moment to look at her before turning back to his place setting with a sour expression. "Forget eating, Padfoot, just teach me which one of these forks I can best jab into my leg and bleed out to avoid this conversation."

"Sad," Marlene's face took on a mocking pout, narrowing her brown eyes at James with an odd confidence that Sirius had never seen her wear before- it may have been a social thing, he supposed. "The blood traitor Potter never learned which fork to use."

"Settle down," Sirius snapped, whipping around in his chair so quickly that he wasn't sure at first what had come over him. The dark-haired McKinnon responded with nothing more than a smirk, her freckled cheeks twisting slightly upward for just a moment before her face resumed a stony posture.

"It wasn't an insult," Marlene said calmly, shaking her head as she turned to walk away. "It was an observation."

"Keep your observations to your own table," replied Sirius, sighing and turning his back on her.

It was enough, the retort, to get Marlene to freeze in her steps, cocking her head to the side before walking back over to them, leaning down and ducking her head between Sirius's and Mary's before whispering:

"I'm sorry that they forgot to include the Muggleborn's-Guide-to-Dining tonight," Marlene whispered, voice dripping in a sing-song hardness that reminded Sirius of home. Before he could think of a proper comeback, she was gone, taking a seat across the room between Gavin and Colleen, and Sirius was left staring at a side view of Mary's face, wide eyes fixated sharply on the confusing forks in front of her and trying very, very hard not to cry- as thick as he was about female emotions, he could plainly see that much.

Sirius swallowed hard, watching Mary with a thick knot in his stomach that felt like the embodiment of letting someone down. His hand almost went to her shoulder to comfort her, but he knew how rubbish he would be at that.

So instead, he directed his hands toward her meticulous place setting, swatting at the line of forks playfully and picking up any one that he pleased, tossing one to her as well and pulling forward a single goblet for them to share.

"Merlin, what a bitch," he laughed, bumping his shoulder against Mary's with a smile and successfully diffusing the moment. "I hope there's chicken tonight."

The relief around the table was palpable.

* * *

**Mary** moaned slightly as Sirius ran his lips along her neck, pinning her down on his bed in the Potter's spare bedroom and knotting a hand through her hair, getting caught and lost in the dark curls. Spurned on by the noise of approval, he brought his mouth back to hers hungrily, raking his teeth across her bottom lip, tugging at the hem of her shirt and pulling her hips against his own, shifting so that she was laying atop him with one leg on either side, her hair falling into his face and causing his nose to twitch.

"Stop," she whispered quietly, the soft edges of her musical voice turning up into a laugh even though she was busy admonishing him. "I'm tired. Let's go to sleep."

"Mary..." he complained, groaning out in frustration and digging his nails into the skin of her waist. "Come on."

"You come on," she giggled, rolling off him and landing on the bed beside him with an _oomph_. "Sirius, I've made myself very clear-"

"You made it clear that you were having a good time," Sirius countered, leaning over and kissing her again, worming an arm under her in an attempt to bring her back over to him.

"I was having a good time, silly," Mary sighed, reaching her hand out and flicking him on the nose with her index finger. "And now I'll have a good time snuggling up next to you."

"_Snuggling_," Sirius scoffed dubiously, making a sour expression and rolling away to look at the ceiling. "Do you know who I am?"

"Sorry, didn't mean to offend the macho-man," said Mary, making it evident that she was not taking his frustrations seriously. "Sod off, Black. We haven't even talked yet."

"We've been talking all day," Sirius sighed, giving her a sidelong glance as he sat up at the headboard, adjusting so that she was tucked safely between his arm and torso. "What else could you possibly want to talk about?"

"Seriously?" she asked, wriggling away just enough so that she was looking up at him, her round eyes observing him carefully for any signs of emotion. "I told you that James wrote and says you've been out of it since you left home."

"I've the right to be don't I?" Sirius snapped, with more harshness than he originally intended, jerking his arm away from her and folding it over his chest protectively. "Merlin, Mary, I've been though enough without having to rehash every miserable detail to you, haven't I? Well? Haven't I?"

Mary observed him silently, pursing her lips together into a thin, quivering line.

"That's not fair," she said after a long moment, her voice cracking unsurely. "I'm just trying to be here for you and you never talk to-"

"Sod off, Mary. I talk to you all the time." Sirius snapped, sliding across the bed and turning to fully face her now.

"Apparently not, if you're going 'round saying you're miserable-"

"I never said I was miserable, I just..." he ran a hand through his hair and then brought his hand forward to pinch the bridge of his nose, a headache blooming violently around the edges of his eyes. "Mary, you wouldn't understand, alright? It's not something that you could wrap your head around, because-"

"What, because I'm a Muggleborn?!" Mary had never yelled at him before, but her voice inclined sharply now, pitching slightly into hysteria for a fraction of a second before it leveled out again, chewing on the inside of her cheek nervously.

"No, because you...fuck, Mary. You grew up in a normal family. I don't know why you're taking all of this so personally, Mare, I just...I can't okay? I can't right now. Alright?"

"Alright," she whispered after a pregnant pause, her tone laced with the apology that she didn't need to say but did anyway: "I'm sorry, I'm just...I worry about you. And your sanity."

"Don't," Sirius said, his voice gentle again as he smiled down at her, his eyes crinkling around the edges uncharacteristically as he looked down at her. "And hey- if you're worried about my sanity just bring Evans around next time you visit. Keep James off my case about seeing her and the situation will be improved drastically."

"Fair enough," giggled Mary, swinging her legs over the edge of the bed with a roll of her eyes, making a beeline toward the bathroom in the hall. "I'm going to change into something to sleep in. Can I steal a shirt?"

"Yeah, take anything you want. No, no, actually wait. Take the green one, there on the left. It'll fit you like a nightgown."

"Fashionable," she joked, holding it up against her and striking a pose before skipping out of the room, leaving him alone.

Shaking his head affectionately, the smile still twisted across his face, Sirius sat up and kneeled on the bed, pulling the blankets out from under him and arranging the pillows in a doubled-up pile that would be better for them to fall asleep on. He tugged the top sheet free of its tucked position, folding it down enough so that he could crawl beneath it...and locked eyes directly with a beam of light dancing across the neighboring yard.

He tried not to look, he really did, but a blend of habit and curiosity drew his face toward the glass pane. Marlene was sitting on the same lawn chair she'd spent the day sleeping on, illuminated by a pool of light that was being cast by her wand. She reached into a bag sitting beside her and pulled out the long white bandage from the morning, the white material glowing far less drastically now that it was nighttime.

She started at the crook of her elbow, pressing the bandage against her skin and then wrapping it around herself until white material eclipsed white skin, leaving no trace untouched. She moved slowly, with a deliberate, practiced skill, eyes darting to the main house and then side to side just as they had in the morning. Her chest rose and fell in piqued, shallow breaths like a nervous animal whose hiding place was about to be found out. Her hand went around and around and around and around...

_His bedroom door began to creak open slowly and then swung out of the doorway at full force, gently nudging against the opposite wall with a hollow thud._

_His father, Orion, stood just over the threshold, half obscured by shadows, yellowing teeth stretched into a grimace across his wrinkled face, puckered and pulled from years of age and gravity. His eyes were focused, but wild._

_"You're going to have to give this game up eventually, boy," Orion croaked, jabbing his chin in the direction of the bandage that was wrapped tight -too tight, Sirius could feel his pulse jumping uncomfortably against the bondage- around his son's forearm. "It's all going to catch up to you eventually."_

_"It's not," Sirius has said indignantly, and in his memories his own voice sounded more faraway than his own, more childish than brave. "Not tonight anyway."_

_"You were born to hold up this family," Orion snapped, his eerie calm demeanor cracking only slightly. "That isn't something you can walk away from unscathed. You leave here and you'll be finished. Trash. Do your duty, Sirius."_

_"Fuck. You."_

_The door had slammed so violently behind his father that night that the entire Noble and Most Ancient House of Black seemed to shake._

"Sirius?" Mary's voice, timid and worried in the doorway, was what brought him back to reality. He snapped his head over to her and only then did he realize that he'd been frozen by the window, breathing heavy, a layer of cold sweat just beginning to bead across his forehead. "What are you looking at?"

"Nothing," he said quickly, almost too quickly, shaking his head to clear it and collapsing back onto the bed with a relieved thump, holding his arms out, beckoning her to join him across the room. "I was right, you know. That doesn't look half bad on you."

"I'll take that as the highest compliment from you," Mary sighed, grinning as she scampered across the room and fell onto the bed next to him, lifting up his arm and burrowing against his torso, making herself right at home. "Are you sure you're alright? You looked like you'd seen a ghost."

"Yeah, yeah," he grumbled, brushing it off and settling against her, feeling his eyes becoming heavier the longer their laid together in the dark. "Hey...Mary?"

"Mmh?"

"I...just...you know what? It's not important. Goodnight."

"Night."

He'd tried, he really did try to open up to her. But she wouldn't understand- there was no way.

He fell asleep quickly that night, eyes heavy from the long day but strangely peaceful.

However, the entire time he was dozing off, all he could see in the back of his mind was an image of a stark white bandage wrapping around and around and around and around and around...

His last thought before he passed out completely: If he couldn't make Mary understand what he was going through, maybe there was somebody who already did.

* * *

**A/N: Blackinnon. Jily** (eventually).** Updated every Monday** _(except for last week I am so so so sorry, college got stupid and crazy)_.** Reviews make the world go 'round. -A**


	4. Frustration

**frustration** |frəˈstrā sh ən|

noun

the feeling of being upset or annoyed, esp. because of inability to change or achieve something _: I sometimes feel like screaming with frustration._

• an event or circumstance that causes one to have such a feeling _: the inherent frustrations of assembly line work._

• the prevention of the progress, success, or fulfillment of something _: the frustration of their wishes._

* * *

**Mary** left early on Monday in a series of half-asleep groggy kisses through the still-dark morning air, leaving nothing in her wake but the steady monotony that had marked her pre-arrival. Sirius didn't get out of bed until hours later, but he didn't fall back asleep either- he couldn't.

He just laid there as the sun gradually rose higher into the sky, eyes heavy and salty but refusing to close, listening to the steady sounds of the morning routine: James dragging himself out of bed with a groan, always banging his shoulder against the doorframe on his way to the bathroom. Mrs. Potter banging and bustling around in the kitchen, scraping together three plates worth of food, leaving one at the edge of the counter for Sirius even though they both knew it would be cold or worse by the time he got around to picking at it half-heartedly.

He couldn't tell whether it was better or worse that he'd been sleeping through the nights now; it was better, surely, because he knew it meant he was more comfortable, more at home. The only place he slept through the night, with a few plain exceptions, was at school. But healthy as it might have been that he was sleeping, he found it increasingly difficult to get out of bed in the morning.

The exploration of the manor hadn't taken as long as he'd hoped; from the libraries to the attics to the cupboards that lined the sitting room bookshelves, he could have walked the place blind. He even knew the ins and outs of the sitting room directly off the kitchen, where Mrs. Potter entertained her friends and the parents of the boys' schoolmates when they came to visit. The room was strictly off-limits and therefore it was the one that he had learned best.

Spending all day in his bed, however, didn't stop Sirius from learning the patterns of the summer village.

Even from his bed, propped up on is pillows and craning his neck slightly, there was only one constant that he needed to observe: all week long, just as he pulled himself out of bed to splash water over his face and use the bathroom after everyone had gone to work for the day, Marlene would appear in her backyard -white bandage ever more present- and fall asleep under the blazing hot sun. As Sirius prepared to go to bed at night, after a long dinner cooked by Mrs. Potter and after a game of wizard's chess with James, she would rise along with the moon and go for a run.

Somewhere in the back of his mind, he wondered which he would ask if he ever spoke to her again: where she was running to, or what she was running from?

And would he even talk to her, really, if he had a chance outside of the limited contact that was offered: the arrival of her family, looming like an unpleasant chore for the entire household, promptly on Saturday evening. She hadn't come the week before, but he couldn't get rid of the nagging feeling that something, something, something was bound to happen when she did. But if she didn't...would he seek her out? She was a presence, more than a person, hovering on the opposite side of the fence and seeming to hold the answer to a question he hadn't figured out how to ask himself yet.

One of his queries, at the very least, was answered when that Saturday arrived, in the early pre-tea bustle that always surrounded Mrs. Potter readying the kitchen for company. It was prompted, as most things in the household seemed to be, by a sarcastic comment from James.

"Well, look at that, Mum," James had said haughtily, impatiently pulling at the tie around his neck as he swiveled around in his seat by the counter, watching her cook with a childlike look in his eyes that Sirius suspected had been a part of a longstanding ritual, punctured only by James's emphatic pointing toward the clock across the room. "They're...four minutes late. The Pureblood horror. Want me to nip on down across the lawn and ring-"

"No," Mrs. Potter cut in, so suddenly that even her son, so familiar with her reactions and idiosyncrasies, paused without being pushed, the smile fading from his face. The stunned reaction from her son and his best friend did not go unnoticed by her, no matter how stressed, and she turned to the boys a moment later, a sheepish expression crossing her face as her cheeks flushed slightly. "I mean...no. Thank you, Jamesie. I didn't mean to snap at you."

"Are you alright, mum?" James pressed, his smile completely gone as worry lines deepened in his forehead, putting down the spoon he'd been fiddling with and turning his undivided attention to her; a rare feat indeed, even for family.

"Of course I am," she chuckled, but the dark bags under her eyes seemed to increase their prominence in disagreement. She'd taken to pacing the house at night; they could all hear the creaking floorboards. Something was going on, over their heads.

"Cut the crap," James countered, in a voice sharper than Sirius'd ever heard him use even in front of his parents before. Mrs. Potter was taken so by surprise that she bumped her elbow on the counter in her haste to spin around and look at him, jaw hanging open slightly.

"Excuse me, I don-"

"Oh, you don't? You don't bring your friends around when you think that we're both asleep? You don't shut yourselves up in that sitting room and mumble and mumble all night until you have to leave for work in the morning without sleeping? What are you playing at, Mum? I'm not a child anymore. You have no reason to lie to me."

"I never said you were a child, James." Mrs. Potter answered staunchly, pinching the bridge of her nose and casting a look over at Sirius; whether it was concern or embarrassment, he couldn't tell. "It's complicated. Whatever mischief and theories you two boys have been putting your heads together over-"

"Actually, this is the first I've been brought into this." Sirius said, shooting a side-eyed look to James across the counter. It was true.

Another confused look from Mrs. Potter.

"Well, at any rate...just..." Mrs. Potter cut herself off with a sigh, turning off the burner on the stove and starting to pile plates onto the kitchen table. "James, you know that if I could tell you more...Sirius I hope you know the same at this point."

"Are you in any danger?" James pressed, leaning forward toward his mother, stare unblinking. It was clear that he'd rehearsed this conversation in his head and it was not at all going the way he'd hoped.

"James, of course I'm not." Mrs. Potter insisted, and it was one of the few convincing things she'd said all afternoon.

"It's them, isn't it? It's the sodding McKinnons?" James wasn't asking, not really. He already knew, and besides: if he hadn't, the resounding silence that followed was telling enough.

"We don't know," Mrs. Potter said finally, returning to her bustling in the kitchen, a slightly more defiant air about her. "It's like I've told you a million times, boys. We are...we're here to keep an eye on things. Alright? We're having them over for these dinners for a reason."

"And what reason is that?" Sirius found himself asking without any direction from his brain, doing his best to keep casual and help set the table even as the mother-and-son pair of eyes across the room bored burning holes into his cheek.

"Like I said earlier," Mrs. Potter insisted, an air of finality about it. "To keep an eye on things. But I really would prefer if the two of you didn't go getting mixed up with them when they weren't here. James told me what happened at the Clubhouse on Sunday and I feel it's best if we all- oh, they're here."

Her grand mothering speech was cut off once and for all, not by overlapping speech, but by a rapid series of knocks on the front door. There was a pregnant pause in the kitchen, everyone clearing their throats and looking around at one another, all sharing the same unnecessarily paranoid opinion that they could have been overheard. Eventually, the ice that had just descended over the room was shattered when James jumped to his feet and made his way into the front hallway.

Colleen's high pitched voice was the first audible noise that made its way to the kitchen and she was the first one to appear as well, all wild blonde curls and pink cheeks, still stiff and formal as ever but seeming to be in higher spirits than last week.

"Hello," said Colleen simply, leaving it at that as she burst suddenly into the room and approached the table, awkwardly bobbing her chin toward both Sirius and Mrs. Potter as an acknowledgement, eyes darting around the room with a level of energy she hadn't possessed the week previously either.

In her arms, a pristinely wrapped and oddly-shaped package sat nestled against her chest.

She was followed next by James who had Gavin closely in tow, red hair still an out-of-place sight in the Potter household, surly resting expression looking quite at home on his face.

"Evening," was Gavin's greeting of choice as he crossed the room, putting an indicative hand on the back of the same chair he'd claimed last time and pulling it out, apparently taking the authoritative lead and leading into the meal.

"We brought you something," Colleen piped up, shooting one of those Colleen McKinnon smiles in James's direction- it didn't reach her eyes and never seemed quite comfortable on her face, but she made the effort anyway. "For your sitting room."

"Oh, er..." James bumbled forward toward the blonde awkwardly, outstretching his arms with an obvious confusion as to why the gift was being directed to him instead of his mother. He accepted it with a neutral face, holding it in his arms like a newborn he was afraid of dropping, and set it down still-wrapped on the counter. "Thank you. I'm sure it'll be lovely."

"So lovely," A new voice suddenly sparked into the room, and all heads turned toward the door. Marlene had just entered, making an entrance in her typical fashion that both commanded and shunned all attention. Her dark hair was hanging loose today, tucked hastily behind her ears, and Sirius could swear that at the roots it was beginning to grow in blonde again, the color it had been when he'd known her so many years ago. "Mum's picked it out especially for you as an apology for not coming again this week."

"She's busy again, I'm afraid," Colleen said with a quick-shot half-smile, smoothing over the moment as best she could as she took her seat at the table beside her brother, lifting up her plate and beginning to serve herself and the others congregated around her as well. "She's just been so busy-"

"Cheating on our dad now that he's lost his job," Marlene interjected smoothly, as casually as if she'd been talking about the weather, sliding into her seat across from Sirius and making unabashed eye contact with everyone in the room instead of looking apologetic.

Colleen's formal demeanor was broken for the first time all evening as she dropped the plate she'd been holding down onto the table in surprise, cracking the china around the edges. Gavin merely coughed, his eyebrows flying up but his face regaining its stony composure much faster than his older sister's. Marlene didn't even bother to look smug; she just sat there, unfazed, looking around the table as everyone took their seats and attempted to plow through the mess she'd created seemingly for that very purpose.

Mrs. Potter carried the oddly-shaped package with her to the table, clearing her throat and rustling the wrapping paper as a welcome distraction to all. With a maternal flourish, she carefully folded away the wrapping and gave a perfect housewife's beam of approval when it fell away to expose what was inside. A blue, gray, and green gradient-painted vase of ceramic and china now sat at the head of the table, standing proudly and impressively and seeming to catch the light in all the right ways.

"Like I said, lovely." Colleen chimed in as she recovered, her cheeks still furiously pink but the rest of her reverted back into stony properness. "We got a glimpse of your sitting room last week and we noticed it would go perfectly with the decor."

"The sitting room off the kitchen?" Mrs. Potter asked, genuinely curious, craning her neck to look into the room with a smile. "By Merlin, I think you're right. That's so odd, we usually have the door closed. It would be a wonderful addition to the shelves, though."

"Shall we find a place for it?" Colleen asked, but she was already getting to her feet; already she was beginning the mastery of the housewives code of conduct. She may have come off demure but she knew how to get her way. Smiling and seeming much more at ease, Mrs. Potter rose as well. Colleen touched Gavin's shoulder on her way past him, and he followed suit of the older women.

As the three disappeared into the sitting room beside them, chatting politely, James, Sirius and Marlene were left staring at each other in a tested, waiting silence, realizing that they'd been left alone and together for the first time.

"So," James broke the silence haughtily, wasting no time in letting his face show his true contempt, leaning forward toward Marlene across the table as if he were conducting an investigation- an amateur one at that, but still. "McKinnon."

"So," Marlene fired right back, her face refusing to take on an indication of emotion of any kind, raising an eyebrow in his direction as she clearly mocked him. "Potter."

"Bit warm for long sleeves, isn't it?" James pressed on, and a full second ticked by before Sirius sat forward and looked at his best friend with a start, realizing with a stomach drop what he'd just blatantly implied.

Marlene observed James silently, jaw set but not quite pulled into a stern line as she let her eyes lock with his and then travel his face. Sirius took the opportunity to revert back to his childhood role and observe her as well.

Her skin was pale, like the rest of her family, but smoother somehow, unbroken along the lines of a marble statue but punctured by a spray of freckles that danced across her cheeks and nose with no rhyme or reason to them: pure chaos. Her hair, indeed, was starting to grow back blonde at the roots but he doubted that anybody would notice but him. He seemed to be the only person really paying attention to her.

"You're getting colder," Marlene said after the pause, her voice calm but her fingers surreptitiously curling around the top she was wearing, which did indeed have sleeves that nearly obscured the heel of her hands. Her face remained unresponsive, but her knuckles were white with the effort of her fingers curling, holding onto the material as if it would anchor her into place.

"What are you-" James had started to respond, but she beat him to it.

"Did you ever play that game when you were little?" she asked, cocking an eyebrow and for the first time acknowledging Sirius with a tilt of her chin, expression softening a little. "One person hides something and you have to help them find it, and all you can say is 'warmer' or 'colder'?"

"No, I've never played that," James huffed with an eye roll, clearly put out by her odd behavior. "I had real toys growing up."

"Funny," said Marlene, a semblance of a hard-edged laugh making it's way through the end of the statement as if she really did find it amusing. "Sirius played with his cousins all the time, didn't you?"

James might as well have momentarily ceased to exist for the pointed glance she gave Sirius, her brown eyes reflecting the lights that hung on the walls, already knowing the answer.

"Yeah, I did," Sirius said, his voice stuck in his throat at the start, the memory of directing a blindfolded Narcissa around the Black Manor dawning over him. It was those times that haunted him more than any others- the ones where he could remember thinking that it was possible to be happy there, before the politics really took over.

"He was always good at it," Marlene said with an offhanded shrug, turning back to face James. And turn to him she did: she was constantly surrounded by a buzzing energy it seemed and when she focused on something it was as if there was nothing else in the room. She pointed her eyes at James and no other words were necessary. She was challenging him, in her own way. "Do you think you would be?"

"You're insane," scoffed James with an eyeroll, annoyance etching itself into all the lines of his face. "What's the point of this rambling?"

"The point is," she said slowly, deliberately annunciating every word. "That you're getting colder."

And then, with a look as insolent as her tone, she folded her arms across her chest and tugged up the sleeves of her shirt, exposing nothing but unbranded, milky white skin splattered with freckled and marred by the appearance of several severely purple bruises.

Instinctively, Sirius found his right hand twisting protectively around his left, as if that would help him cover up the similar bruises he seemed to forget had faded weeks ago.

The tense silence that followed was short lived, broken by voices approaching from the other room.

"Colleen," Mrs. Potter's voice rang across the doorway and through the wall, friendly curiosity lacing her tone. "Your wedding is coming up quickly isn't it? You've never told me wh-"

Marlene shattered her still facade and moved so quickly that if Sirius had blinked he would have missed it. Her hand flew out and closed around her fork, with such instinct that she must have had it in the back of her head as an escape plan the entire time, and flung it across the table.

Her aim was spot-on; the fork flew in a straight line and collided against the vase, which had been set on the edge of the table after being unwrapped, knocking it to the floor in a crash made more deafening by the surprise of the fall.

The vase collapsed and shattered onto the kitchen tiles, effectively cutting off the conversation from the parlor and bringing Mrs. Potter, Colleen, and Gavin rushing across the threshold into the kitchen with open-mouthed, shocked expressions on their faces.

"What happened?" Mrs. Potter gasped, looking at the mess on the floor, her eyebrows nearly disappearing under her hairline as she bustled for a towel to clean up the broken shards.

"Accident," muttered Marlene, and Sirius could see the gears turning in her head, fighting to regain her composure and trying to catch up to what she had just done.

For the first time since he'd seen her all summer, she looked ruffled and unsure.

For the first time, she looked like a sixteen year old girl.

"Yeah, tragic accident," James muttered under his breath, cocking an eyebrow at the brunette across the table and coughing in the direction of his soup bowl. Without knowing why, Sirius reached over and punched his best friend on the arm, met with a shocked look from both James and Marlene for entirely different reasons.

"Are you kidding me?" Gavin hissed down at his younger sister so that only she and the boys could hear, his face steadily turning the same shade of red as his hair, his jaw locked into an entirely frightening expression that sharply drew contrast from the easygoing personality he'd displayed so far. "Are you fucking kidding me, Marlene?"

"I didn't-" she started to protest, sinking back into her chair, widening her eyes in the same way that a cornered animal might have.

"These things happen," Mrs. Potter interrupted, cutting into the situation with the expertise that must have come along with being the only parent in the room. "Leave it alone, it's no trouble at all."

"On the contrary," Colleen managed to answer, sounding like she was fighting to push every syllable out, her formal smile pulled tighter across her face than it looked like her face would have normally allowed. "It was, er...we just feel terrible. I'm so, so sorry."

"No harm," Mrs. Potter assured her again, looking quite out of place as she stood in the middle of the kitchen, holding a towel uncertainly to her chest and smiling warmly at the oddly behaving guests. "I'll be able to get that cleaned up and out of the way in no time at all, and then we can get started on-"

"We should go," the command came, surprisingly, from Gavin, who had taken a new spot by the doorway but was staring at his youngest sibling intently as she stared back at him, unreadable composure regained as she folded her arms across her chest and pursed her lips into a thin line.

"But we've been having so much fun, Gav." Marlene insisted, cocking an eyebrow and not bothering to look anywhere other than from his eyes to the mess on the floor and then back up again. "We should stay."

"We really need to be going," Colleen snapped, butting in as the final authoritative word, swallowing hard and pinching the bridge of her nose. "I'm so sorry about-"

"Me," Marlene finished for her before her sister could think of a more tactful, appropriate way to smooth over the situation.

"That's enough," Gavin said sternly, a muscle in his forehead twitching. "Get up, we have to-"

There was a sudden crash from the kitchen's fireplace chamber and everyone in the room suddenly dropped the argument, the tension broken by all eyes turning in the direction of the closed room. A second crash resounded, followed by a chorus of coughing, but it wasn't until the door opened that Sirius realized what had happened.

The wooden door creaked open with a timidness that belonged to only one person in his life.

"Oh goodness, I am _so _sorry," Mary's face appeared in the doorway as it creaked open, glowing red with a blush as her face lifted into a hesitant smile, soot dotting dark grey splotches across her forehead and nose. "Sirius invited us to come out to the party tonight, but there was a lot less room than we-"

"We?" James asked, abandoning his determined glaring at Marlene to swing his head toward the doorway and Mary, ears perking up and his jaw twitching slightly. "I thought just you were coming, Mare."

"Just me? No, I brought- Oh, God I hope I'm not inconveniencing-" Mary spluttered, looking around at the crowded room and clearly sensing the tension, understandably flustered by the sudden influx of attention on her.

"I just thought I'd come along for the night," a new voice from behind her piped up, and suddenly a swish of red hair and a smiling face appeared over tiny Mary's shoulder. "Hope nobody's put out by it."

Pushing past Mary and coming into the room with a bright grin, Lily Evans entered the kitchen, sparing only a moment to give James a quick look before turning her attention to Sirius.

"Thanks for inviting me by the way, Black." Lily continued, clearly amused by the shocked expression on James's face as he watched her, slightly slack-jawed, moving about the kitchen as if she'd been there many times before. "Potter."

"Evans," James said politely, stumbling to his feet and nearly upturning his chair in the process. "You...are here. At my house. Hello. Welcome. To my house. Which you are currently standing in. To come to a party with us. And then stay over at my house."

"If that's alright," Lily answered smoothly, clearly trying to hide her amusement as she got the effect that she'd been trying to get out of him, widening her green eyes and turning them to Mrs. Potter by means of a question.

"Of course it is, dear," Mrs. Potter answered with a small laugh, pulling her wand out and moving over toward the broken vase to clean it, shaking her head in similar amusement as she went. "Nice to see you again, Lily."

"We didn't mean to interrupt your dinner party," Mary chimed back in, moving across the room and standing behind Sirius's chair as he sat, wrapping her arms around him from behind and causing a huge grin to spread across his face as he hugged her back as best he could, leaning over and planting a quick kiss into the crook of her elbow.

"No interruption," Marlene said suddenly, and Sirius was surprised to fins his stomach dropping suddenly at the sound of her voice, feeling an unexplainable guilt at her presence, as if he was the one who'd invited her there in the first place. "We were just leaving."

At his side, SIrius could feel Mary looking across the table and observing the Slytherin carefully, her large eyes unblinking as she visibly tensed. Then, her sweet nature shining through as always, she carefully disentangled herself from Sirius and managed to pick her face up into a smile.

"It's nice to see you again, Marlene," Mary said softly, almost coming off as believably genuine. "Are you going to be joining us tonight at the Meadowes?"

Before Marlene could answer, she was cut off by the voice of Colleen, crossing the kitchen and grabbing her insistently by her wrist, in the same crescent where the bruises were at their most purple.

"No, she won't be," Colleen said stiffly, leaving no room for debate. "She has a big day ahead of her tomorrow."

She left it wide open, but nobody bothered to comment or question as the three McKinnon siblings made their way, unaccompanied, to the front of the house. It was only after the door had slammed and everybody was finally able to release the breath they'd been holding in that someone dared break the silence.

"Have you ever seen someone behave like that at a dinner?" Mrs. Potter mused, moving back to the cooking area of the kitchen to reheat the food that had since gone cold, tutting her tongue as she began to pile it onto plates to make sure the girls had plenty to eat as well.

Sirius didn't say anything, but he had. He had seen brash behavior ruin dinner parties much bigger than this one and in much less time.

And he'd been the one to do it.

* * *

"**Shh, shh,** you're going to get us into trouble," Mary stage-whispered, not so quietly herself, as she and Sirius, hand in hand, stumbled through the pitch darkness of the Potter's foyer, seeming to trip over every obstacle in their way.

"We won't get in trouble," Sirius laughed, ever-dubious, though he brought his voice down low to a husky whisper, half out of habit and half to appease her. "We just need to get to bed in one-"

He was cut off by the sound of Mary collapsing onto the floor, fallen victim to a stray show, and meeting the ground with a loud thump that sent both of them doubling over in a wave of barely-suppressed raucous laughter.

"What happened to being quiet?" he hissed at her, grinning widely as he bent down and extended a hand, her tiny form appearing next to him again once she'd regained balance.

"The floor moved," she retorted, ever-giggling, ever-proud, slurring her words indicatively.

"I'm afraid to let you on the stairs like this," Sirius laughed in return, his laugh a bit too loud for the situation as he embarked up the staircase with creaking faux-silenced steps, hearing her cautiously climbing up behind him. "Mary?"

"Yeah?" asked the short brunette, and even though he was facing away from her in the dark he could picture the way her eyebrows perked up upon being addressed, the way her eyes got brighter when she looked at him with that smile of hers.

He reached the landing first and took only a moment to turn around and shoot her a grin as she struggled up the last few steps in her heels.

"Race you to the bedroom!" and just like that, he took off; the pretense of keeping quiet was all but abandoned as she let out a playful yelp, nearly tripping on her way to the landing but scrambling to beat him all the same, nearly catching the back of his shirt at one point but trailing behind as he flung open the door to the bedroom and crash-landed on the bed with a loud bark of a laugh that he'd forgotten he had within him.

"You cheated," gasped Mary a moment later when she finally appeared in the doorway, trying to sound indignant but grinning from ear to ear as she slipped into the room and closed the door behind her, shaking her head incredulously as she caught her breath.

"But the important thing is we both had fun," Sirius retorted with an eye roll, laughing still as he collapsed onto his back and settled against the pillows, arms spread wide out to the side and beckoning her over. "C'mere, Mare."

Obliging, she ran at full speed across the room like Sirius used to do as a child- determined to make it to the bed unharmed after turning out the lights- and jumped into the air, landing beside him in a ball of tousled hair and uninhibited laughed, rolling onto her side so that she was pressed up against his rib cage and looking down into his stormy eyes with her dancing hazels.

"Are we still going to have nights like these when you move back home?" she sighed, letting her head rest on his shoulder with a content sigh.

His entire body tensed up; he knew he ought to have let it go as a harmless comment but he suddenly found his shoulders stiffening away from her, pulling himself into a sitting position at the headboard and watching her with a rigid, concerned sigh.

"I'm not going home, Mary. This is...this is it, I don't know why you would think..."

As he grabbed wildly for words, she looked up at him with a furrowed brow and widened eyes, knowing that she'd upset him and trying to find a place for her apology. She, too, sat up beside him, placing her hand -so small and so warm- onto his chest to calm him as she spoke.

"I-I'm sorry, I didn't...it's just that every other time..."

"Not this time," Sirius sighed, and he knew in the pit of his stomach that he should have just let it go from the start. What else was she supposed to think? It's not like he hadn't left home. This would, in fact, mark the third time- all other attempts had ended with him sulking back to Grimmauld Place after weeks or, once, a full month on the run. He needed to make her understand that this time was different. That it needed to be different. But he couldn't. He didn't have the right words.

"Well, good," Mary said suddenly, her tone so resolved that it seemed to shock both of them. "Good. You shouldn't have to."

"Oh, really?" Sirius muttered, clearly amused but still taken aback by her sudden hard stance on the matter.

"Yes really," she answered before he'd even finished asked, shifting so that she was on her knees beside him and looking into his eyes with a fierce determination that reminded him why he'd liked her in the first place. "You deserve it. You're just...you're good. And kind. And you don't get enough credit for-"

"You're drunk."

"Sod off, I'm trying to tell you something," she snapped, so sudden and so resolute that even Sirius didn't have time to formulate a comeback.

"Alright," he said hesitantly, giving her a wary glance. "Have at it then."

"Okay," she huffed, but smiling again, swinging one leg over his torso so that she was straddling his hips, one hand on each of his shoulders as she looked down at him through the darkness. "Sirius Black. You may not be able to see it in yourself -don't you dare interrupt me, I see you preparing sarcastic wit- but you are one of the most genuine, fun, and good-hearted people I have ever met. And I'm glad you got out of that house so that maybe you can finally realize that. Every night I spend with you is the best so far and...I think that I love you."

_Fuck. _Fuck.

He needed to answer. He needed to say something, didn't he?

But even as his lips tried to make him reciprocate the words, his brain was screaming in protest for it to halt. It wasn't that he didn't care about Mary. He cared about Mary _a lot_. More than any other girl, for sure. More than most people he had come across. He could have told her he loved her, he was sure, and not regretted it in the morning. They'd been together so long that he might as well have said it. Nobody would be able to judge him for it; not after all this time. But he couldn't.

It wasn't that he wouldn't consider himself lucky to be in love with someone who walked as quietly and spread as much happiness as Mary Macdonald.

It was that he couldn't understand why someone like Mary Macdonald would be in love with _him_.

He needed to answer, he needed to answer...his brain churned for a reply, for anything that would satisfy both of them, for anything that would make the moment as special as she was clearly trying to make it.

But then, all of a sudden, he didn't have to say anything.

Mary was kissing him.

She was kissing him harder than she ever had before, one leg on either side of him as she ran her teeth lightly over his bottom lip, causing his eyes to sink shut.

"Mary..." he started to say, still trying to express the jumble of feelings and thoughts that were swirling like a tornado inside his brain, but she pulled back just long enough to press her index finger to his lips.

"Shh," she whispered for the second time of the night. "You don't have to say anything."

She was calming the storm behind his eyes, giving him room to breathe. He never did quite figure out how she was the only one who could do that.

And then she was kissing him again, more urgently still, hands dipping under the hem of his shirt and tracing the muscles of his stomach and chest. She was moving faster than she ever had before, breath hot against his neck as she pressed open-mouthed kisses against it, pushing her hips into his with increased pressure until his breathing had picked up and he'd lost any semblance of control he was trying to hold on to.

Taking back the control, Sirius knotted his hands through her hair and pulled her closer to him still, moving his mouth against hers and begging for entrance until both of their lips were swollen and chapped, reaching for each other in a series of ragged breaths and groping hands until they weren't measuring by time anymore.

Clothes came off little by little. First was Mary, pulling her dress above her head and tossing it to the floor beside the bed, watching him as his eyes traveled hungrily over her skin glowing white in the moonlight, helping him when his hands fumbled over the clasp of her bra.

He lost his shirt early on, flinching only slightly when she insisted on kissing at the scars and bruises that littered his torso from place to place. His pants when later -he wasn't entirely sure when- but they landed at the foot of the bed, belt and all, leaving him in just his boxers for Mary to tease around, sliding her hand just inside the waistband as she flicked her tongue against his earlobe.

It was, by far, the farthest they'd ever gotten, a light sheen of sweat forming on Sirius's brow after the drawn out minutes of hot breathing and falling chests, a warm put of adrenaline and anticipation pooling in his lower stomach as he pushed onward, exploring every inch of her.

He didn't know when he'd flipped her back onto the mattress, moving so that he was pinning her down, but he had- holding her in place while he dragged his mouth over her: lips to collarbone, breast to stomach, her inner thigh while she shuddered beneath him. And then there was nothing separating them at all as she pushed his boxers away with a deep breath and bold courage, kissing him deeply so that she didn't have to acknowledge the moment. His thumb hooked under the elastic of her underwear -a swatch of black lace that he realized she must've worn for the occasion specially- and guided it down her legs gingerly, trying hard not to notice the fact that her knees were shaking.

Sirius kissed her again as she let out a noise of content, wrapping her arms around his neck and deepening their kiss, tilting her chin up to allow him access to her throat, lifting her hips to grind against his as he pressed himself against her entrance and threatened to break through the tight skin there, harder, and harder still. He buried his face in her neck and closed his lips over her hot skin, chest rising and falling against hers as he realized he was so close to finally crossing the line, so close to finally sealing the deal, so close to, so close, so...

"Wait, stop!" Mary's voice sliced through the silence with so much vigor that Sirius's heart did a double-beat as if he'd been waiting for this interruption the entire time. Swallowing hard, he pulled away so that he was hovering over her, their skin still pressed together in a way that was driving him slowly insane, and looked her in the eye with a kind of undisguiseable madness that he didn't feel compelled to contain.

"Wait for what?" he finally managed to choke out, but as he observed her face, he knew what she was going to say.

"I've, er...I can't. Tonight. I've changed my mind. I just...please don't be angry with me...I-I-I've just never...and it's you...and...I'm sorry."

For a long moment, his eyes bored holes through hers, narrowed at the edges, his hands closing tightly around her forearms where he'd been pinning them down. He had a horrible, sickening thought that he wished wouldn't have run through his head: _I could go for it. I don't need to stop. I'm so close, and she said...she said..._

She'd said to wait. That was the bottom line.

Slowly, breathing hard and setting his jaw into an impossible straight line, he unclenched his hands from her arms and pulled away from her to sit up on the bed. He knew that he had not right to feel anger, and he didn't think he did, but something dark and frustrated was stirring within him as he found his boxers on the floor and stepped into them, keeping his eyes trained carefully on the opposite wall instead of on Mary, trying to get his normal composure back.

"Bathroom," was all he grunted on his way out the door, trying not to slam it and failing miserably.

One he'd reached the little bathroom at the end of the hall, painted in shades of blue with glass and gold trinkets sitting around the sink, he splashed his face with gold water from the faucet and then gripped the edge of the counter for support.

In the mirror, he stared at his reflection stonily for what could have been hours. His own eyes, pale gray and flecked with frustration at his own behavior, looked back at him admonishingly, coldly.

He blinked, and then with a start released the counter and looked around the room wildly to make sure that he was very much alone. Leaning closer into the mirror for further inspection, he brought his face to the glass until his nose was nearly brushing against the cold surface, studying his own eyes with a suspicious squint.

They stared back at him, cold and gray as ever.

For a moment, just then, he would have sworn on his life that they were a sparkling, familiar brown.

Eventually, he drifted back to bed where Mary had already gotten re-dressed and was either sleeping or pretending at the very edge of the mattress, curled up on her side, chest rising and falling evenly, released in the form of tiny sighs.

At 3 a.m., Sirius awoke shouting, covered in a cold sweat that was a product of his usual nightmares. Mary didn't stir; he wasn't sure if she was indifferent to his panic or had finally realized she couldn't be of help to him. Part of him was relieved to not be subjected to endless questions that he knew he could never make her understand the answers to. Part of him had never felt so alone.

He could hear the sounds of Marlene running back and forth in the neighboring yard, her nightly run to keep herself awake, and it was to that sound he finally tricked his brain into falling back to sleep.

* * *

**a/n: I'm sorry that this one is both late and a bit of a filler; finals week is approaching fast, but I've finally typed out the next 5/6 chapters so I promise that updates will be regular from now on. Like I said, this chapter was a bit of a set up/filler but the next two chapters are extremely Marlene/Blackinnon heavy. Reviews, as always, are appreciated. Thank you!**


	5. Sacrificial Lamb

**sacrificial lamb **|ˌsakrəˈfi sh əl lam|  
noun  
_A sacrificial lamb is a metaphorical reference to a person or animal sacrificed for the common good. The term is derived from the traditions of Abrahamic religion where a lamb is a highly valued possession, but is offered to God as a sacrifice for the forgiveness of Sin._

* * *

**It** was a Tuesday morning the first time that Sirius jumped the fence connecting the Potter and McKinnon yards.

It was a thought that had occurred to him in the past, obviously, sneaking through the back of his mind as he spent his afternoons idly wandering the house. But it was never something he thought he'd ever act on; it should have been destined to remain buried in the dark regions of his brains along with the daydreams about his mother finally dying and the intense urge to strangle his brother when he crossed in front of him. The thoughts that should not exist. The thoughts that crept up on him.

He woke up close to noon, not groggily and in a thick summer heat haze, but bolting upright in a desperate gasp for air, coated in a thin layer of icy sweat.

The nightmares hadn't ceased.

The nightmares hadn't ceased and the bags under his eyes had swollen to twice their size and he felt like he was running even when he was fast asleep, desperately trying to fit in the last few pieces to a puzzle he hadn't consciously or willingly started.

And so, on a whim, he decided to go see Marlene McKinnon.

The fence was taller than he was -which was saying something- but he was in a one-track state of mind and he hardly paused long enough to hook his hand over the top rail of dark wood and blinking up at it before he was using a knothole as a foothold and pulling himself over. He landed on the other side of the fence with a graceless thump, nearly losing his balance and his feel collided with stone instead of grass, the paved surface of the patio.

Marlene was laying on her stomach on her same old lawn chair, an unlit cigarette pursed between her lips and the white bandage laying in a unwrapped coil on the ground nearby.

She didn't even look up when he arrived.

She wasn't surprised, clearly. He wondered idly if she ever was.

"I was wondering when you would show up," Marlene sighed, still looking straightforward as she tapped her wand to the end of her cigarette and igniting it, taking just one inhale before holding it out in front of her and focusing her attention on the white smoke swirling away from her and disappearing.

"Guess you can stop wondering now, yeah?" he crossed the yard slowly, feeling a slight twinge of irritability flit through him. She didn't shift over to open a spot for him on her chair and so he awkwardly sunk into one of the nearby others, scooting it along the pavement slightly but stopping when it made an awful grating sound.

"Hark. The mystery is solved," she replied dryly, heaving another sigh. There was a long, drawn out moment of silence in which Sirius opened and closed his mouth several times, wondering whether or not to puncture it or if the pausing was a part of her script. She always seemed to have one. "Do you know what my problem is?"

"Your problem?" scoffed Sirius, cocking an eyebrow at her. "I expect the list would fill a dozen pages."

"Yeah," was all she said in return, drawing out the process of smashing her cigarette a little too roughly into an ashtray before her. And then, mercifully, she finally turned to look at him with her amber eyes, her expression unreadable as ever. "But the central problem. The one that sparked it all."

"Oh, I would love to hear that," he said, and he meant it. It was odd, sitting with someone and talking so candidly, without prelude. Someone he didn't know. But then again, he almost felt as if he did. "Think you've got it all mapped out, have you?"

"My problem," Marlene said, pausing for emphasis and looking back to her untouched cigarette as it burned itself down. "Is that I was brilliant as a child. Really smart, yeah? Clever. Everyone told me how brilliant I was. I think maybe I got hold of that message too early. Once you get it in your head how brilliant you are, it's hard to put your focus on anything else. It makes you lazy, knowing how brilliant you are."

She locked eyes with him again and the silence was even longer than the last time. He didn't even think before he answered.

"I don't think you're brilliant," he said bluntly, looking her straight in the eyes and not bothering to look away this time. "I think you're a bitch."

Marlene looked at home for a small eternity, her face as smooth and unreadable as ever, and for a split second he thought that she was going to start screaming at him or launch back an insult.

But then, something more even unprecedented happened. A switch behind her brown eyes seemed to flip on, and Marlene McKinnon smiled at him for the first time.

It was an astronomical smile, really. The real deal. Her lips split apart to showcase her teeth, pulling into a true laugh so glowing that her eyes crinkled around the edges. Composure lost, she dropped her chin down before pointing it at him again, mouth still curled back and shoulders shaking as she looked him at him with those eyes of hers, which were suddenly dancing with a light he'd yet to see.

There was a fleeting moment that Sirius was glad Marlene didn't smile often. If people knew what the possibilities were, he was sure, they would stop at nothing spending every day of their lives trying to get her to do it again.

"Good answer," she laughed when she was through smiling, her face gradually slipping back into an unreadable surface, the laugher leaving in small spurts until he'd forgotten what it looked like in the first place. "Any more hard opinions on the subject?"

"You're like an overgrown precocious child that causes trouble just for attention."

The words were out of his mouth before he could stop them.

She did not smile this time.

"Looks like you've hit the nail on the head," she sighed after a long minute, but he saw her roll her eyes as she shifted her weight to sit up. Something almost like disappointment flickered across her face for a brief second, but Sirius couldn't be sure whether or not he was making that up entirely. For some reason, he was reminded of her warmer and colder game and a stomach in his knot tightened.

"Nice threads," Sirius said as she sat up, breaking the tense silence that had blossomed between them. She was wearing an overlong shirt, a blazing emerald green with the Slytherin house shield and Quidditch insignia proudly displayed on the front.

"Thanks," was her simple reply; she folded her arms across her chest self-consciously but at least she didn't frown this time, picking absently at the shirt collar with a furrowed brow. "Nicked it from my brother. He played when he was at school, but I...too busy, I guess. Wanted to have something to represent, though."

"Wanted to have something to represent the house full of sneaks and violent prejudices? What a charming memento."

He spat the words out before he could really think them through, and the look on her face clearly showed how stung she was. Sirius didn't have long to appreciate the rare show of vulnerability, however, because anger was the next thing to flush across her features.

"Last time I checked," she began, her voice fighting to stay steady but her jew set tightly as she glared at him, unabashed. "The Slytherin house qualities were cunning and ambition. I was under the _impression _that I could do with those qualities what I pleased. Not everybody is vying to be in the house of the reckless showoffs, you know."

"Well I was under the _impression_," Sirius was quick to mock her quick tone, face growing warm half from anger and half from embarrassment, dangerous pride building up in his chest like a wave of lava. "That the snakes seem to go rotten more often than not." And then, before he could stop himself: "Besides, none of that changes the fact of what I've been hearing."

"Oh, and what have you been _hearing_?" She scoffed haughtily, every syllable a dare.

"I've _heard_ that your family is supposed to be a bunch of blood-prejudiced supremacists with one foot in the door of the dark arts." He was exaggerating, but only just so.

"Funny," Marlene spat, not missing a beat and not sounding as if she found the matter very funny at all. She raised her eyes to meet his, and the anger radiating under the surface was almost tangible. "I've heard the same thing about yours."

She tore her eyes away from his and leaned back into her chair, finally taking a drag off her half-burned cigarette and staring off into the distance placidly, knowing that she had won. A plethora of half-stuttered comebacks strung their way loosely through Sirius's mind, but no words actually bubbled to the surface. Eventually, realizing that she was not wont to break first, he slowly rose to his feet and retreated back to the Potter property, silently fuming.

* * *

**He** hated to admit it to himself, but Sirius looked for Marlene all week.

He'd taken to spending most of his days up in his bedroom anyway, flicking through some borrowed textbooks of James's and giving a halfhearted attempt to catch up on his schoolwork for the upcoming term. Or folding and re-folding the clothes in his drawers. Reading the Daily Prophet obituaries and making up details for some of the sparser entires.

Anything to keep himself from going stir crazy.

Anything to pretend that what he wasn't really doing was looking out the window, waiting on a sign that Marlene was about to appear in her usual spot.

For three maddening days, she didn't. But then, mercifully and suddenly on Friday, Sirius heard a crash from next door as he was lying spread-eagle on his back, counting the ceiling tiles. He sat up with a start, almost embarrassingly fast, and was not surprised to feel a sense of annoyance building up within him. He'd had days along in the house with nothing but new comebacks and arguments to think of. As childish as it was, he couldn't help but stay fixated on the argument from earlier in the week; insulting his House was worse than insulting his actual home. And besides, she'd clearly had it coming to her, talking big...

Bringing his face to the window, Sirius began to imagine marching right over there and telling her off as she sat in her chair, maddeningly stoic and smoking or sleeping. He imagined how good it would feel to finally get one over on the irksome presence over the fence that seemed to have all the answers before the questions were asked. He even imagined, for a small moment, that he could have hated her.

And then he saw the blood.

He was jogging down the steps before he even had a chance to consider what the right course of action would be; even from afar, it had looked worrisome- blood on her face, her arms, walking with a definite limp. Things he'd seen before, knowing Remus, but never on someone so suddenly, without explanation. Never on somebody who -he was sure- had nobody to help them.

The fence was easier to jump this time, with the momentum he'd picked up, but he didn't even have a spare moment to cherish the look of genuine surprise and horror that came over her face when he landed on the concrete patio.

"What happened?" he was asking before she even had the opportunity to adjust to his presence, standing awkwardly in the middle of the yard like a beaten-down scarecrow, squinting over at him as if trying to adjust to a blindingly sunny day.

"Go home, Black," she muttered with an eye roll, but her voice was a croak and she looked in even worse shape up close, all bruised and battered on top of being bloodied up.

Sirius took a step backwards as if to heed her command, but paused long enough to catch her eye. She stared back at him, a shell-shocked deer-in-the-headlights shining through. Her shoulders were shaking but he couldn't tell if it was from the injuries or not.

"What happened?" he asked again, his voice calmer now, trying to get her into a easier frame of mind as well. Moony was like this, always, when he first transitioned back. Afraid but trying not to show it. Angry. Too bloody proud to accept help.

"Don't ask me questions," she answered, gritting her teeth and chewing on the inside of her lip. She was making eye contact with the bridge of his nose now, he realized. "And I won't have to lie to you."

Sirius couldn't help it. He let his eyes flicker to the skin of her left forearm. He almost felt ashamed at the spark of relief he felt when he saw that the skin there, at least, was unmarked.

"I'm helping you get cleaned up."

"I've been through worse."

"It wasn't a question, McKinnon."

She tried to shoot him a glare but it was cut off by a too-obvious exhale as she shifted her weight painfully onto her right leg. Sirius could see glass sticking out of the wound, only just so. This time, he wasn't going to be the first to break. He simply cocked an eyebrow and looked from her down to the injury and back up, repeating it several times with a self-assured look on his face as he waited for her to fold. Marlene tried to turn and walk away, but her injured leg sagged under the sudden weight and he heard her coughing to cover up her wince.

"Fine," she finally spat, the word shot out into the air through a clenched jaw, as she limped over toward the back door. Her shoulders were still shaking, but this time he assumed it was from annoyance. He'd never felt more smug.

Whistling cheerfully just to aggravate her further, he followed close behind as she yanked the back sliding door open and stepped into a surprisingly cheerful looking kitchen. Sirius paused for a moment to look through the glass of the door, realizing that he'd never given much stock or consideration into what the McKinnon house would look like. It wasn't their main residence, surely, but he'd been expecting more of the gargoyles and stone bullshit that the backyard seemed to imply. Or maybe, then again, he was just speaking from experience.

It was these thoughts that distracted him as he attempted to step over the threshold and was repelled backwards as if a layer of invisible stone were blocking the door.

Startled, he stepped back up again, extending a hand toward the open air and finding that his path was indeed blocked by a force much stronger in nature than any enchantment he'd encountered before.

Instead of apologizing, Marlene stood in the kitchen slouched against the counter, watching him with a look of undisguised amusement.

"Come in," she insisted, her voice a drawl as she swept her hand in a grand flourishing motion, rolling her eyes at her own feigned formal attitude.

"You bloody well know that I can't-" Sirius started to protest, sticking his arm out again to emphasize his point, frustrated confusion only growing when he found that there was now nothing in his way. He stepped fully into the kitchen now, sliding the door shut behind him and shooting her a lingering glare before turning to inspect the doorframe.

An even pattern of small white pebbles lined it from the inside, placed a few inches from one another at different jagged angles. In fact, upon closer inspection, they didn't seem to be pebbles at all, but rather...

"Are these _teeth_?" Sirius asked, torn between reaching out in their direction, his face an even blend of horrified curiosity.

"Vampire fangs," Marlene sighed, as if she was tired of explaining why orthodontia was her family's decorative pattern of choice. "It's where the myths come from- all of that 'you can't come in unless you're invited' bullshit. Works better than a normal security enchantment."

"But how did-"

"Are you going to patch me up or not?" she fired at him, raising a dubious eyebrow. "My family'll be home soon, and-"

"Enough said," Sirius scoffed, holding his hands up in a mock surrender.

Marlene made an attempt to hop up onto the counter, her knuckles white around the peaks as she pulled her weight off of her injured leg and tried much to hard to look casual while doing so. Sirius did his best to let her have this little victory, pretending that he did not see her as he moved over to the sink and wet a cloth that hand been lying around. However, by the time he finished that task and she was still kicking her legs fruitlessly, he crossed back to her and put his hands roughly around her waist.

"What are you-" she started to protest, but he wasn't in the mood to deal with her games.

With a grunt of effort, he held her tightly by the sides and lifted her up into the air for the few necessary inches it took to her her seated comfortably on the countertop, her bony knees poking him in the stomach and the two of them were brought to eye level for the first time. A rush of something passed through him; something that didn't anticipate and action and din't have a name, but something strong nonetheless. He stood before her in stillness for a long moment, the two of them locked in eye contact, grey against brown, something warm and explosive pooling into Sirius's stomach. Why did he feel like her knew her?

The silence was broken when Marlene cleared her through insistently, nodding her chin in the direction of the wet cloth in his hand.

"Right, right," Sirius replied to her gesture, shaking his head to clear and it reaching out for her cheek, holding the cloth to it to soak up some of the blood that was running a red river down the side of her face. Her reaction was swift and violent, lashing out under the sensation of the cold making contact with her, the less-injured leg swinging out on reflex and making a beeline to kick him. "Wotcher!"

"Sorry," Marlene replied curtly, and for a moment he almost believed it was true. "Just...let me take care of that. You can do the heavy lifting."

Sirius rolled his eyes but complied, gingerly taking her calf in his hand and straightening out the worse-off leg, grimacing down at the cut that had a particularly nasty shard of glass protruding from it.

"It's not that bad," he lied, his voice blatantly sarcastic and giving him away. It was worth it for the dry laugh he received in return. "If you give me a second, I think I might be able to..."

He pulled his wand out of his back pocket fluidly, and tapped it lightly over the wound, praying that he was using the right incantation and wouldn't make her break out into purple boils or something equally as horrific. To his relief, however, after four or five times the cut managed to disappear completely, the skin healing over in a shade of raw pink.

Marlene sat and chewed on the inside of her cheek while all of this happened, holding the wet cloth to her face and mopping up the blood. It took a while, but eventually she began to look like a just-more-weathered version of herself, the dark bags under her eyes becoming more evident as the blood disappeared from view. The bruises that littered her body still remained, and he was sure that it would be painful her to walk again when she tried, but he felt a strange sense of pride in himself that he'd been able to put to use _something _from last year's coursework.

"Alright, that's it on the bleeding," Sirius said finally, sighing and slipping his wand back into his pocket. "You should really get up to bed though. An actual bed, not a chair outside, assuming you have one?"

"I have one," she snapped at him, knowing that he was teasing him but still to high-strung to care. Struggling to shift forward, Marlene gritted her teeth again and dropped off the counter and put her full weight onto her legs again, unable to stop the loud gasp that she let out when she hit the tiled floor.

"Easy," said Sirius automatically leaning forward and catching her under the arm, holding her up until she was steady. "Where are the stairs?"

"You don't have to-" she started to say, but he cut her off with a snort and began to move toward the kitchen door.

"Warmer or colder?" he teased as they walked, and he swore that she almost smiled.

The foyer was more imposing than the brightly lit kitchen, all stone and marble and flecked with accents of green stained glass that tossed the light around and made the whole room feel as if it were an echoing underwater cavern. The steps were dark wood and didn't creak as the pair of them hobbled their way to the second story of the house.

"It's the one down at the end of the hall," Marlene explained in a low voice that made her sound like an unwelcome intruder, as if she didn't really live there at all. "I think I should be fine to sleep her today, since everyone is ou-"

All of a sudden she went rigid and froze, cocking her head to the side and staring intently at the door they had just passed. A scuffling and creaking was coming from within, the sounds of feet shuffling across the floorboards and an unmistakable low whisper. Unsettled, Sirius remembered her comment about how nobody was meant to be home.

Detaching herself from Sirius, Marlene made her way quietly over to the door and he could see from even feet away that she was holding her breath. With a surprisingly steady hand, Marlene reached her hand out and took hold of the doorknob, twisting it silently and then pushing it open all at once.

The commotion that happened was instantaneous.

"_GAVIN_!" was the horrified phrase that left Marlene's throat and Sirius snapped at once for his wand and she stumbled backwards into the hallway, somehow whiter than she'd been earlier. He pulled it out to a defensive position, ready to face whatever horrors laid behind the door.

But Gavin came rushing out into the hallway a moment later, looking unharmed but frenzied, his shirt undone and his eyes wild underneath uncharacteristically tousled red hair.

"Marlene," her brother panted, out of breath and clearly caught off guard, shaking his head at her. "I didn't...You're not supposed to be home..."

Slowly taking in the scene, Sirius lowered his wand and stiffly concealed it in his pocket again. As Marlene just stood rooted to the spot, mouth agape, Sirius was able to move to the side and see over her shoulder.

Another boy, an ex-Ravenclaw from what Sirius could tell or remember, was sitting at the edge of Gavin's bed in a similar state of dishevelment, looking just as horrified as Marlene had sounded a moment ago.

"What are you _doing_?" Marlene said; Sirius could tell that it was meant to be a hiss but it came out as more of a defeated whine, a plea. "You promised that you'd _stop_. You're supposed to get _married _in a few years, I can't keep-"

As Marlene pleaded on in a voice Sirius had never used before, Gavin was talking back at her, his voice quick and low and desperate and hard-edged.

But then, all at once, the talking from each of the siblings ceased as a noise came from the front of the house: the noise of footsteps coming up the front path.

There was one, long moment of horrified silence.

Then Marlene burst into action so quickly that Sirius found it hard to believe she'd been injured only a few short minutes ago.

"You aren't home," she barked at Gavin, with such harsh conviction that Sirius doubted he would have gone against her even in a more normal state of mind. She pushed against her older brother's chest, hard, shoving him roughly back into his bedroom with the type of strength that only comes from a spike of adrenaline. "You and you come with me. Now."

Her command was barked at both Sirius and the strange boy at the edge of Gavin's bed who had started to shake slightly; whether it was from the sudden emergency or from the force of Marlene's commands, Sirius was never sure.

"Faster," Marlene insisted, her voice harsh but forming more of a plea than a command, yet again. She tripped down the stairs, leaving no regard for her injuries, as her hands desperately pulled at the bottom of her own shirt, pulling it above her head and then flinging it to the floor as she ran on in just her bra. In another situation, in another lifetime, Sirius would have been rendered immobile by the sudden exposure but his legs continued to jog after her, pushed on by the urgency of the afternoon.

The three of them skidded into the kitchen just as the sound of a key fumbling into the lock of the front door sounded out, echoing against the stone floors.

Marlene ran around the room in wild, panicked circles, knocking over every breakable item that she could see. Two vases fell to the floor. A teapot. A pitcher of water by the window. The front door opened just as she managed to pull herself up onto the counter, grabbing the strange and extremely confused boy by the collar and yanking him over in her direction, wrapping her arms around his neck and pushing her lips across his cheek, leaving a trail of lipstick.

Setting the scene.

"Go," she hissed at Sirius, furiously pointing toward the door and then throwing frenzied looks back toward the kitchen's entrance. Footsteps in the hallway.

"Let me he-" he tried to interject, but her face became filled with an emotion that could only be described as rage.

"_Go_!" It was a bark this time, an undeniable order, and Sirius took off running through the back door of the house and out into the yard just in time.

He had just reached the fence when the shouting started from within the house.

His legs carried him on autopilot back into the Potter's home, running still even though the threat for him was over. James was standing in the kitchen, looking angry, looking concerned. Pointing at the McKinnon house and asking him twenty questions all at once.

But Sirius didn't stop.

Legs still pumping furiously, he made it all the way back up to his bedroom before he stopped to even think about catching his breath.

For the first time in his life, he was pondering the differences between a black sheep and a sacrificial lamb.


	6. Alibi

**alibi** |ˈaləˌbī|

noun ( pl. **-bis **)

a claim or piece of evidence that one was elsewhere when an act, typically a criminal one, is alleged to have taken place

* * *

"**Are** you sure you're ready for this?" James poked his head in through Sirius's cracked open door that Saturday in the early evening, wearing a collared shirt for dinner but nothing other than boxers underneath, his hair in its usual state of disarray as he observed his friend with a raised eyebrow.

"Ready for what?" Sirius asked, pulling himself off his bed with a groan, rubbing his eyes sleepily and making his way over to the closet to try and find something presentable to wear. It was Saturday, but he'd spent all day in bed that day instead of spending his time flying with James.

He had been avoiding James a fair bit that week, honestly, ever since he'd seen Sirius coming home from the McKinnons. Always the questions, always the tone of playful suspicion. He wouldn't've known how to explain what had just happened over there if he tried. And so he didn't try.

"For dinner tonight," James said with a deadpan expression, as if it should have been obvious. It was, but that wasn't the point. "Your two lady loves colliding."

"I'm sorry, my _what_?" Sirius asked incredulously, biting the bait and turning around just in time to see his friend walk through the room and collapse onto his bed with a laugh.

"Your two lady loves," James asked again, and it was only now that it occurred to Sirius that he had been kidding. "You know, the wonderful ball of sunshine that's turned your life around and the moody cow that lives across the way."

"I didn't _shag _her, mate," Sirius snapped with an eye roll, pulling out a blue shirt from his closet and pulling it over his head, not bothering to smooth out the wrinkles. "She's horrible."

"Just wanted to make sure you remembered," laughed James again, getting to his feet and making his way back to the corridor. "You never _did _tell me what you were doing over there in the snake pit."

"Yeah," was all Sirius mumbled back, shooting a grin in the other boy's direction, more to appease him than anything but still feeling the twinge of amusement that always came along with one of Prong's harebrained comments. "And 'snake pit', by the way? Not your best."

"You're a wanker," James sing-songed on his way out the door, running a hand through his already impossibly disrupted hair. But he let the issue drop when Sirius didn't present him the information. He always did. "Whatever you were getting into, just...don't, alright? All politics aside, that girl is a grade-A bitch. I've known her my whole life."

He'd disappeared into the hall and closed the door behind him before Sirius could argue , even to just himself, that it felt like he'd known her his whole life, too.

* * *

**Mary** was already in the kitchen by the time that Sirius finished getting dressed and dragged himself downstairs. She was sitting at the table though it was only half-set, twisted around in her seat and chatting with Mrs. Potter animatedly as the older woman finished preparing the Saturday meal, bustling through a long line of pots and pans, dropping different spices in.

"You're here!" Sirius said with a smile as he crossed the threshold, making a beeline for Mary as she climbed out of her seat and made to meet him halfway, bouncing on the balls of her feet over to him.

"Did you forget I was coming?" Mary asked, her glowing smile faltering slightly at the edges as she paused in place.

"No, stupid, I've been waiting for you all week," Sirius insisted, wrapping his arms around her in a tight squeeze, knowing that this, at least, was one of the most true things he'd said all week. "I'm glad you're here, Mares."

Mary didn't say anything in return, but he could feel her smiling against his shirt as she hugged him back, letting out a small laugh as she twirled on the spot and marched back to her seat, leaning her chin in her hand and continuing to chat animatedly with Mrs. Potter over the sounds of clanking cookware.

"No Lily tonight?" Sirius asked, leaning against the counter and craning his neck to see what was cooking on the stove.

"Not tonight," Mary chimed in with a sigh, shrugging in his direction and tucking a dark curl behind her ear. "Something about her mum having a work event. I'm not entirely sure."

"Bummer for James," scoffed Sirius, running a hand through his hair and sharing a laughing glance with Mary.

"Bummer for who?" James asked, bounding into the kitchen with a grin, his hair in its usual state of distress and pointing up in every possible direction, his shirt still wrinkled. It was the same air of disarray he stubbornly insisted on showing up in on every Saturday that the McKinnons dined with them; his own personal and silent sigh of disrespect.

The cheeky reply that Sirius had planned to launch back in return was interrupted, as suddenly as it had popped into his head, by a knocking on the house's front door.

e

"Ah, McKinnon time," said James, his eyes automatically rolling as he paused to look toward the hall, his distaste immediately evident. "Magical."

"Just shove off and get the door, James." Mrs. Potter laughed, her smile upturning in one of those rare and beautiful moments where it couldn't be clearer that she was James's mother.

"So the fun starts now then?" her son taunted in return, not moving any closer to the door and run

"Honestly-"

"Everyone relax, I'll get the door." Sirius cut in, with an air of finality and a resolve he didn't know he'd had. But suddenly, he knew that he very much wanted to be the one that let the McKinnons in. If not out of morbid curiosity about the events a few days ago, then just to diffuse the tension that might crop up between Marlene and Mary- not that it should, however. Not that there was any reason for there to be.

"Oh, Sirius dear, don't worry about-" Mrs. Potter tried to step in, but Sirius just shot her a good-natured smile, already having learned ways around her hospitality.

"Yeah, yeah. I've got it." he insisted, shrugging as if it was no big deal. He didn't miss Mary's head-tilted look as he slipped out into the hall, but he pretended that he did. "Coming!" he shouted in the direction of the front doors, hearing the muffled voices on the other side go silent, leaving nothing but the sounds of shuffling footsteps as they waited for him to unlock it.

Taking a bracing sigh for a reason he couldn't quite put his finger on yet, Sirius undid the chair lock on the door and swung it open, doing his best to push a smile onto his face.

"Sirius!" It was Colleen who first greeted him in the doorway, her blonde hair bouncing the sun off of it as she crossed the threshold, her smile as always stretched too tightly across her face, entering the home without waiting to be invited or giving him too long of a glance as she breezed into the foyer and made a beeline for the kitchen.

A woman entered behind Colleen, shorter than Sirius and yet he found himself stepping back as she entered, almost tripping over his own feet to get out of her way as she glided inside, chin held almost comically high. She had white-blonde hair that was pulled tightly back, leaving her face -stern and tightly pulled, with a fine network of wrinkles beginning to bloom around her eyes and lips- and the predominant feature, hawk eyes roaming the foyer and stopping on Sirius for one moment that was both brief and curt.

"You've grown," was all the woman said, and if it wasn't for the slight Scottish accent that worked its way in around the edges of her words, he almost wouldn't have recognized her from his childhood and the stories he'd heard passed around about her in the past few weeks. Even beyond that, if he was being honest.

"Mrs. McKinnon," Sirius said, brow furrowing slightly, his hand automatically extending in respect. She touched her hand with his for an impossibly brief second before withdrawing it. It was still chilling, that split second in which they made contact, realizing that she was, in fact a real person. Until then she had just been an entity, a legend. Nothing tangible.

"Sirius," was all Mrs. McKinnon added to her acknowledgement of him before she, too, was headed toward the kitchen without so much as a glance back over her shoulder.

Gavin entered last, leaving the porch empty and Sirius with an unexplained dip of disappointment in his stomach. The boy kept his chin tucked low, in sharp contrast to his proud mother, his shock of red hair hiding his face as he made his way into the house, swallowing hard and making his unwillingness to be there quite clear.

"Gavin," Sirius said, his voice hard-edged but trying to be hospitable, spilling over with questions that he knew he would never be able to ask.

Gavin did not even spare Sirius the brief looks that the women in his family had, just shrugged his shoulders and set off down the hallway, dragging his feet, shoulders slumped as if the weight of the world rested on his shoulders even though both knew perfectly well that that burden had been passed on to his younger sister.

Keeping his eyes locked on the retreating redhead, Sirius heaved another sigh and leaned his hand against the door, pushing it shut yet again- only to have it stopped a moment later by the force of a hand from the other side.

"Oi!" Marlene's voice came suddenly through the crack in the door, annoyed at the core as always but tinged with laughter around the edges, caught somewhere close to a smile in his mind when he pictured it. "Trying to lock me out? Not that I wanted to be here anyway, but..."

She pushed her way into the foyer as she mumbled the end of her sentence, throwing her shoulder against it playfully and then crossing into the dim hallway, shooting Sirius a withering look. He let out an unconscious sigh of relief seeing her stroll across the floor, endless legs leading the way elegantly, crossing in front of one another and coming to a stop beside him, pale arm extending to meet his own and pushing him to let the door swing shut for real this time.

Perhaps if he hadn't spent so much time focusing on her limbs, he would have sooner noticed her face.

It was when Marlene folded her arms across her chest that Sirius finally lifted his eyes, to her heart-shaped face that was half-obscured by her wild dark hair and an unnecessarily overbearing pair of sunglasses.

"What the fuck, McKinnon," Sirius started right off the bat, harsher than he had intended it, shooting a quick look over to the kitchen hallway, bouncing on the balls of his feet as he bided his time and kept his voice low. The two were practically strangers, yet the argument unfolded as naturally as a hug between old friends. "I haven't seen or heard from you all week since the-"

"I was a little busy," Marlene snapped, giving his attitude right back to him, hand finally reaching up to her sunglasses and pushing them up to the top of her head.

He didn't react right away. Then again, he didn't see the bruising until a stray beam of light crossed her face.

It was purple, at the worst of it, where her makeup had failed to conceal the coloring, blooming from the corner of her eye and down her cheekbone in a blush that had clearly not been on the path to healing since delivered, marring the right side of her face.

"Fucking hell," Sirius very nearly spat out, extending his fingers toward the mark, getting within an inch of her skin before she was raising a hand of her own to smack his away, hitting him twice just for good measure.

"Are you crazy?" She hissed, scowling at him and looking very much like she was considering putting her glasses back on. "Don't...Merlin. Don't touch it. Twat."

"Sorry, er...fuck. Sorry. What the hell have you been doing all week? All hell broke loose and you just tossed me out without an explanation."

"I think the whole situation explained itself pretty well, Black." said Marlene, her sentence upturning into a scoff at the end, her head shaking back and forth.

"The whole situation where you jumped the bloke your brother was fu-"

"I was protecting him," Marlene cut him off in a snap, her voice raising as anger flooder her tone, her eyes flashing dangerously at him. He did not back down.

"Protecting him?! Protecting...Marlene, he's a grown fucking man. He can protect himself and-"

"No he can't," she insisted, huffing as her anger didn't shrink. "He can't protect himself. None of them can bloody-"

"That's what you're fucking doing isn't it, McKinnon? Taking all the bullets? Thinking they won't hit anyone else? Was that the whole deal with shattering the vase and shooting your mouth off at dinner? You're always fucking protecting someone-"

"So what? So what if I'm protecting-"

"You can't protect _everyone_ all the-"

"Who says I can't?" Marlene's voice was nearly a growl; had she been a child she would have stomped her foot in protest.

"Who protects you?" Sirius growled back, poking his index finger out into her shoulder, unable to still or justify the rage that was bubbling up inside him like a vat of hot acid.

"I protect me," Marlene insisted, her tone just as stony, unyielding as ever. She didn't even flinch; forget about backing down. "_I _protect me. So I don't understand why you're trying to do it. I don't fucking know you."

"I'm not trying to protect you," laughed Sirius, hard-edged around the edges, almost cruel. "I'm trying to-"

"To what? Cajole me into ending up like you? Convince me that I need your help to run away from the big, bad Pureblood social circle?" Marlene's arms were once against folded over her chest, fists clenched so tightly. "I have some news for you, Black. I'm not exactly drowning here. I don't need you to ride in on your fucking motorcycle and whisk me away from a sticky situation. I don't need rescuing."

"I"m not trying to rescue you," Sirius fired back, jaw clenching, knowing at once that he was speaking the truth. "I don't want to _save _you_. _I'm not trying to make you leave. I'm trying to let you know that you're not an awful person for _wanting to_."

Whether Marlene was left speechless without a retort -which would have been a first- or if it was because she caught sight of Mary slipping into the hallway before Sirius did, he never found out. All he knew was that Marlene fell silent, eyes seeming to squint around the edges as if she'd never seen him properly before.

"Are you...coming to the table?" Mary asked, half obscured by the shadows from the hall, eyes bigger than usual as she watched the pair of them with trepidation. "The, er...the food is out..."

She, too, was squinting at Sirius with a level of unfamiliarity that unsettled him.

"Yeah, Mares," he said slowly, turning his eyes to her and seeming to break out of the trance of anger that had been drawn up between him and the youngest McKinnon. Coughing to clear his throat, he ran a hand through his hair, taking a few steps toward Mary as if Marlene hadn't even been present in the foyer, as if it were just the two of them headed off for a normal dinner. As if things were ever normal. "Yeah, let's go. I'm starving."

Uncertainly, Mary backed out of the foyer and lead the way back to the kitchen, the footsteps from her tiny feet bouncing off the walls and echoing through the hall. Sirius followed her slowly, almost forgetting that Marlene was in tow until she pushed past him, bumping her shoulder against his as she did so. As she passed, she only hissed out one sentence:

"Who says I _want_ to leave?" was all she snapped, dark hair swishing over her shoulder as she stubbornly pulled on her sunglasses, obscuring her face again.

"You're allowed to be a human every now and then," Sirius made an attempt to protest, but he never did find out whether or not she heard him.

* * *

"**Are** you going to say something or are you just going to stare at me goggle-eyed all night?" Sirius snapped, sliding his shirt off of his shoulders and onto a hanger, standing in the doorway of the open closet and being far more irritable than he knew he should.

Mary was uncharacteristically matching his attitude at the moment, sitting on the edge of the bed cross-legged and staring at the same fixed spot on the wall. Dinner had been over for an hour and she had yet to say a word; her typical lighthearted chatter was completely absent and she'd been looking for the better part of their solitude like she was very much working up the nerve to shout at him. Sirius thought he might has well have started it off.

"I'm not staring at you google-eyed," Mary muttered, finally lifting her eyes to meet his, the frown looking so unfamiliar on her face that he almost didn't recognize her. "I don't have googly eyes. These are my eyes."

"And beautiful eyes they are," Sirius acquiesced, raising an eyebrow and grinning at her even though he knew the moment wasn't right for it. His comment was met by a small sniff and an attempt at a smile from Mary; it was something, at least. "I don't understand why you're cross with me."

"I'm not _cross_ with you," Mary insisted, chewing all the while on the inside of her cheek, uncrossing her arms with a heavy sigh. "I just don't understand why you were talking-"

"Talking to a fellow dinner guest? After I opened the door for her? Oh come on, Mary. This isn't like you. This isn't you. You never have problems with me talking to other-"

"It's not because she's a girl," Mary cut across him, quite possibly for the first time in her life. "It's not."

"Okay, then what?" Sirius was purely humoring her at this point, rolling his eyes as he turned back to the closet and hung his dinner shirt back up on the rod. "_What_, Mare?"

"It's because...because...you know!" Mary spluttered, waving her little hands around now, trying to find the words to argue with him. "She insulted my blood not even two weeks ago for one thing."

"And that was a fucking shitty thing to do, Mares, I know. But that doesn't mean we were huddled up in the corner planning the demise of all muggleborn-"

"And she kept doing it all night. Which you would have noticed if you were paying better attention." Mary huffed out, cutting off the end of his sentence again.

"She did not," Sirius said slowly, mind churning back over the evening, replaying it his mind just in case her point was valid. "The Potters would have said something if-"

"Well she didn't say anything _outright_," insisted Mary, dropping her gaze to her legs and picking at a frayed string on the cuff of her shorts. "It was in her _tone_, yeah? Just...just the way she was all 'Oh, Mary, what a sweet blouse you have on. Did you get it in Hogsmeade or did you make it yourself'. What a cow."

"You _did _make it yourself," Sirius mumbled, resisting to urge to laugh.

"Yes, but...it's just...it's not the _point_, Sirius, stop _laughing_ at me right now. Honestly. You just don't see it because you're suddenly her _friend_ and-"

"I'm not her friend," Sirius said, tone instantly becoming stony again, turning to face her with genuine confusion. "Mary, I don't fucking know the girl. At all. Did you not see the massive bruise on her face? I was just making sure that-"

"That's not your _business_. Just because you have a soft spot for vulnerable-"

"McKinnon is _not _a vulnerable...excuse me? What the hell are you talking about? I don't have a soft spot for-"

"Do you remember how the two of us got to talking in the first place?" Mary interrupted for a third time, and for a moment Sirius forget they were arguing, a soft smile coming over his face.

"Of course I do," he laughed, glad that the dark mood had hit a snag. "You asked me to help teach you defensive spells, so we started to-"

"Why?" she snapped, folding her arms again and cocking an eyebrow at him in such a switch of a second that he felt almost tricked by the swelling in again of the argument, coming back to bite at him.

"Why what?"

"Why did I ask you to teach me defensive spells? Why not James? Or a professor?"

"Because..." Sirius said slowly, a knot tying up in his stomach as he realized what hot seat he had been plunked into. "Because, after Mulciber attacked you..."

"Right," Mary sniffed, hazel eyes shining up at him, clearly pleased that he'd found his way so quickly to what she was hinting at. "After Mulciber...you were the one who found me, and fixed me up, and checked on me afterwards."

"This isn't the same thing," he sighed, finally crossing the room and sitting on the mattress beside her, leaving a few feet of space between them as a buffer.

"How is it not the same thing?" she sighed in return, and he couldn't tell if she was consciously mirroring him or just doing that thing, that Mary thing that she always did, trying to put herself in his shoes to sympathize.

"It's not, Mary." he replied curly, unsure suddenly how to put into words how unbelievably different the situations were. To him at least. "First of all, I'm not trying to be there for her, or whatever. I asked her one fucking question. And I didn't find her...in some corridor after an incident. I just...you know. Thought I could give some advice. She comes from a Pureblood family that's overbearing as hell, and she's covering for her brother -she won't admit it, but I swear she's fucking taking heat for him- and...and..."

"You think you're like her," said Mary. It wasn't a question. "You think your situations are similar, don't you?"

"Don't _you_?" Sirius fired back after a long moment of tentative silence.

"No," answered Mary, a little too quickly. "I don't. You're not like her. You're sweet, and you're kind, and you're _good_-"

"Stop it," Sirius snapped, harsher even than before without intending to be, on his feet before he knew what was happening. "Stop. Mary. Just don't. Stop it."

Mary was taken aback as well, still sitting on the mattress, looking up at him with eyes that were as confused as they were wide.

"I don't...what...you _are_, Sirius," she stammered, shaking her head slowly, trying to figure out what had set him off. "You are. You're good. You're such a good-"

"I'M NOT!" Sirius bellowed, or at least he must have. He didn't remember the sound being ripped from his throat, filling the room, but it echoed through his brain and pounded in his ears. He didn't feel like he was in his body as he turned on the spot and left, but he heard his bedroom and the front door being slammed behind him as he went.

He didn't know the reason for his outburst, didn't have a name, even, for the coursing anger that was swirling through his veins. He could not pinpoint to source of the childish, violent, churning feeling that was driving his legs to move forward.

He didn't know anything, in fact, wasn't aware of any of his surroundings.

Until he found himself pushing his way, without knocking, in through the front door of the Meadowes's house, where the Saturday party was in full swing.

* * *

**Sirius** didn't feel connected to any of it. He felt as if he were gliding his way through a dream, unexplainable aggression still controlling him like a hazy sickness. The chandelier was swinging back and forth and the voices filling the foyer must have been very, very loud- but all he heard was a dull roar that didn't quite make its way into his eardrum.

He wasn't looking for alcohol, but once he found it he fell into it like a nap at the end of a long day working. He pulled a bottle right out of the hand of a boy in a suit jacket, clearly washed up straight on Dorcas's porch form dinner at the clubhouse, and drank from it without stopping, without tasting, without bothering to pour it into a cup or over ice. What was the point?

He didn't realize that he was looking for Dorcas until he saw her, but when his eyes found her -leaned up against a wall in the kitchen, drink clutched in her hand, laughing at a joke that somebody else had told that he couldn't hear- and didn't bother with a prelude.

Her lips were still beginning to form his name when he collided his own against them.

Nobody around them said anything; perhaps no one saw, perhaps no one cared, or perhaps they were all too drunk to pick it up on their radar.

Dorcas fell into him at once; she'd been waiting for it, after all, or at least that's what she whispered to him as he lifted her off her feet, pulled her with him into a side room, her teeth scraping lightly against his earlobe, his hands working furiously against the buttons on her blouse.

It wasn't until a full ten minutes later, when Sirius was collapsing on top of her, panting for breath and covered in a fine sheen of cold sweat across his forehead and back, that The Thought occurred to him.

He wondered how long it would be until he stopped acting as terrible as he felt inside. Maybe that way, at least, he had a way to explain it. Maybe that way, at least, he would know why he felt destroyed if he was the one destroying himself.

Dorcas reached up to kiss him, but he deliberately jerked his cheek out of her reach. He left her on the couch he'd lain her down onto, redoing his belt, standing up straight to survey the room.

"Where's my shirt?" he asked, brow furrowed as he scanned the room with a frown.

"You...you didn't show up wearing..." Dorcas stammered out, her voice higher than usual, more out-of-breath than breathy. "What's the matter with you?"

"Good question," Sirius spat on his way out the door.

He needed to get home to the Potters. He just needed to get back home and everything would be alright. He could talk to Mary. He didn't need to mention anything, but he didn't have to lie. Maybe he could say...he could explain...he could just say that...

"Black?" Marlene's voice cut through the crowd like a bullet, more confusion than snark for once since he'd met her.

Sirius whipped around, not sure if what he was actually hearing was true. But there she was, dark hair thrown over one shoulder, brow knit together, standing off in the corner between a pair of seventh year Slytherins that Sirius only knew from detention.

And then all of a sudden she wasn't in the corner anymore, but was making a beeline for him across the crowded room, grabbing him by the crook of his elbow, dragging him back out into the foyer, over the threshold, onto the front steps. The air outside was thick and heavy, but her hands were icy cold on his skin.

"Sirius?" she asked, her voice less sure than usual, looking up at him with those eyes. Those fucking eyes. "What the fuck is wrong with you right now? Did you take something?"

"What?" he asked, shaking his head as he looked down at her, something that could almost have been concern twinkling behind her glare. "No...no. I'm...shit. I'll be alright. It's been a long night. Everything's fucked right now."

"Get out of here, Black," she sighed, her voice reverting back to it's hard edged command.

"Says who?" Sirius taunted, again feeling a fight building up in him. "I've as much right to party as everyone else, don't I?"

"Get - out - of - here," Marlene sighed again, every syllable pronounced through gritted teeth and narrowed eyes, not shrinking away from him the way Mary had. "I'm fucking serious."

"You're not fucking me," was his reply, topped off with a laugh, a wink thrown. She was not amused.

"Go home. Now."

"Is that a threat?" he teased, scoffing and making it clear that he was not taking her as credible, his grin lopsided as he reached over in an attempt to ruffle her hair. His hand was met, for the second time that day, with a smack from hers. "Are you threatening me?"

"It's not a threat. It's a warning." Marlene hissed back at him, and the smile finally faded from Sirius's face.

"What are you-"

"It's a fair warning," was all Marlene said back to him, folding her arms over her chest and shrinking back toward the front door, pale hand resting on the knob. "Go home, Black."

"What home?" he asked it before he knew he'd planned to, though his feet were already cutting a path down the front steps, aiming for the path.

"I don't feel bad for you," Marlene said in reply, voice barely above a whisper. "Just go home, Sirius."

And he did.

* * *

**Sirius** woke up the next morning to a pounding headache and an empty bed, just the way he'd found it when he came home from the Meadowes's party last night. He hadn't bothered going to James's room to ask where Mary had gone. He wasn't sure he wanted to hear the answer.

He could hear the tinkling of teacups in the distance from the kitchen, and it was the only motivation that he had as he pulled himself out of bed, bare feet hitting the cold floor dragging their way to the staircase.

Getting food into his churning stomach was the only thought in his boggled mind...until he heard the voices that were floating up the staircase to meet him. He'd come to expect the gentle admonishments of Mrs. Potter in the morning, maybe the muffled, half-asleep grunting of James making a half-assed reply.

But there was nothing sleepy about James's voice that morning, and as Sirius entered the kitchen he saw that, instead of being slumped over at the table waiting for his cup to be filled, his friend was buzzing around the kitchen in his mother's usual position, bustling over a kettle as it shrieked over the stove.

And the female voice hadn't been Mrs. Potter's at all.

It was Marlene.

"Yeah, everything," she was saying, dark bags under her eyes as she sat on a stool at the counter, looking like she hadn't even attempted to sleep a wink. "I heard that they're going to stay with an aunt in Surrey."

"What's going on?" Sirius asked as he pushed past the door and entered the room, looking around the room with the confusion of someone who'd just stumbled in on an intervention. "Who's in Surrey?"

"The Meadowes," James answered, his voice gruff as he fumbled over one of the spices for the tea, not even looking up as Sirius entered. "Marlene's mum just sent her by to let us know."

"Know?" Sirius repeated slowly, and something in his stomach seemed to sink. "Know...know what?"

"The whole place burned to the ground last night," Marlene said, and the tightness in her voice seemed to match the constricted feeling in his own throat. "We found out early this morning. Everyone at the party got out alright, but my mother wanted to make sure that neither of you had been there and gotten offed or anything."

"Wait- what do you mean it burned down?" Sirius asked, feeling like a child trying to take place in an adult conversation that was far over his head.

"They don't really know what caused it," she said, quieter than before. "Everything's gone, though."

"Dorcas has already skipped town, apparently," James chimed in, hands bumbling as he he carried two teacups to the table, setting one in front of Marlene and taking a long sip out of the other. "So has Mum, apparently, so I'm sorry if this tea is shit. Did my best."

"I'm sure it's fine," Marlene said, stiffly, curtly, clearly feeling out of place in the home, especially when she'd been asked there spur of the moment, no family around her. She gave an apprehensive look to the teacup in front of her but picked it up all the same, holding it up to her lips and casting a side-long look to Sirius. "So neither of you were there?"

"Nope," James said, taking the lead as he slid into the chair across from Marlene, resting his elbows on the table and leaning toward her like he was preparing for an investigation. "I hit the hay early and Padfoot spend the night in with his girlfriend."

"Right," Marlene said, nodding and pursing her lips together, her thumbs anxiously flicking against the rim of her cup. "I didn't make it out there either. It's such a shame."

"Why didn't you go?" Sirius jumped in, looking at her with a glare that didn't disguise his intentions at all. "Didn't you say something at dinner about wanting to?"

"Yeah," said Marlene quietly, bringing the teacup to her lips for a quick sip before she began to explain. "But I decided-"

The rest of her explanation was cut off in a fit of choking and spluttering coughs as the teacup dropped from her hands, shattering against the surface of the table and spilling a wave of brown liquid across the table and onto the floor.

James reacted faster than Sirius did, jumping to his feet with a shout, but Marlene reacted even faster than that. Before Sirius could even piece together the fact that the cup had broken, she was picking up the broken shards and -all tiredness replaced with pure fury- and started them chucking them through the air at James, who could not duck in time to avoid the flying china.

"ARE - YOU - FUCKING-" Marlene was shrieking at the top of her lungs, hurling china shards until there were none left, her eyes wild as her hands thrashed about the table. All politeness or stiffness in her posture had completely vanished, replaced by a wild, raw, unhinged flash of anger. "POTTER. YOU'RE A FUCKING-"

But what James was, Sirius never heard. Marlene, out of things to throw, stormed from the room as suddenly as her fit had started, shrieking obscenities the entire way out. In her absence, the kitchen fell into an eerie silence between the two boys, uneasily finding the other's eyes. It was James who broke the silence, swallowing hard.

"Fuck," was the extent of his explanation, running a hand through his hair and looking around the destroyed kitchen, his frustration almost tangible. "Fuck."

"Prongs, what the hell was that?" Sirius finally worked up the nerve to ask, numbly moving toward the stove to grab a dishrag.

"Fuck," James repeating, falling back into his chair, head shaking back and forth. "Truth potion. Or...fuck. The best I could do in a pinch. I don't think I made it strong enough, she shouldn't have been able to taste it. Maybe if I ask Evans for help next time she comes by..."

"You spiked her drink?" Sirius asked, turning incredulously toward the other boy, rag falling out of his hand. "With a truth potion? You _spiked _her _tea_-"

"Yes, alright?" James snapped, slamming his fist down onto the surface of the table with more anger than Sirius had seen jump out of him in months, at least. "I did what I had to do. While you were busy cozying up to her or whatever it is you've been doing, I've been trying to get some real information-"

"Information? Information?! Prongs, have you gone completely barking mad?"

"Somebody's got to do it, Padfoot. This is a real, fucking war-"

"That's what your mum is up to though, isn't she? All of them. They're all fucking in on it. Let them do their job. For once, I'm not going to pretend that I have any idea what I'm doing and for once you probably shouldn't either-"

"That's bullshit, Pads. Complete and utter bullshit."

"Just because everyone is so wrapped up keeping an eye on the McKinnons-"

"The McKinnons," laughed James, a hollow chuckle of disbelief. "The McKinnons? The McKinnons were _cleared_, Padfoot. They're not keeping an eye on _them_ anymore."

"What are you-"

"They're not watching the _McKinnons_," James snapped, almost a roar that matched Marlene's now, striding over to the counter and yanking open a drawer, pulling out a bundle of papers that had clearly been lifted from his mother's writing desk and slamming them down onto the counter, pointing wildly. "Padfoot. They're not watching the McKinnons. They're watching _Marlene_."

* * *

**A/N: I've got 99 problems and rewriting the middle of this story because I changed the ending is all of them. I am so sorry!**


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